Learning to Read Connections—Sensitivity to Collocation Frequency Links Vocabulary Size and Reading Comprehension in Middle Childhood

Abstract

The collocation frequency of words in the language environment contributes to early vocabulary development. Vocabulary size, in turn, predicts children's reading comprehension skills later in development. Both collocation frequency and reading comprehension have been connected to inferential reasoning at different time points in development. Here, it was hypothesized that 8‐year‐old children's (N = 147; 76 female) sensitivity to collocation frequency would be related to vocabulary size and reading comprehension skills of varying complexity. Participants completed an auditory thematic judgment task to assess their sensitivity to collocation frequency (response accuracy or speed). In the task, children were presented with a short sentence containing a reference word (e.g., “John sees the cloud.”) and asked to judge which of two subsequent words best fit the sentence (e.g., “rain” or “lip”). Semantic relatedness between reference words and test words was operationalized in three levels (strong, weak, and distant) based on a corpus‐based analysis of collocation frequency. Multilevel and mediation analyses confirmed that thematic judgment responses were related to corpus‐based measures of collocation frequency and were associated with vocabulary size and reading comprehension skills at the sentence and text level. Furthermore, thematic judgment predicted vocabulary size and reading comprehension when the relation of decoding and reading comprehension was taken into account. The study highlights sensitivity to collocation frequency as a link between early language comprehension development (i.e., lexical retrieval and inferential reasoning) and reading comprehension in middle childhood. It also integrates theoretical approaches from computational network or distributional semantics studies and behavioral experimental studies.