The ability to learn new word meanings from context by school-age children with and without language comprehension difficulties

Abstract

This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups: children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

The relation between children’s reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms

“…Thus, there is direct evidence that superior comprehension of idioms is related to text processing skills and use of context. Children with poor reading comprehension have well-established difficulties with inference from context in other areas of text and discourse processing (Cain & Oakhill, 1999;Cain et al, 2001Cain et al, , 2003. This finding demonstrates further their fundamental difficulty in using context to support comprehension.…”

“…There is a well-established relation between childrenÕs reading comprehension and their ability to generate inferences from text. For example, when compared with same-aged good comprehenders matched for word reading and vocabulary skills, children with weak reading comprehension are less likely to integrate information between sentences in a text to ensure cohesion (Cain & Oakhill, 1999), generate coherence and elaborative inferences (Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001), and use context to derive the meanings of novel words (Cain, Oakhill, & Elbro, 2003). If use of context is crucial to idiom comprehension, children with poor reading comprehension should be specifically impaired in their ability to use context to facilitate their understanding of idioms.…”

Early predictors of letter knowledge

“…In a study by Bowey (2001) on the development of vocabulary from 5 to 6 years of age, a receptive test of syntactic knowledge accounted for speciWc variance in vocabulary after nonword repetition was controlled. Syntactic knowledge might help to comprehend a sentence or a series of sentences, and this in turn has been found to contribute to the derivation of the meaning of a novel word (Cain, Oakhill, & Elbro, 2003).…”

Learning verbs more effectively through meaning congruent action animations

“…The sentences were not a dictionary definition of the word, but instead used the verb in a meaningful way (e.g., Bert is een mooi beeld aan het beitelen, word-by-word translation Bert is a beautiful statue PROGRESSIVE chiseling, meaning: Bert is chiseling a beautiful statue.) We chose this for two reasons: First, much of the vocabulary that children learn is presented in exactly this way (see Cain, Oakhill, & Elbro, 2003). Second, by using definitions we would have created a situation where the definition gives necessarily correct information about the meaning.…”