Automatic Contextual Facilitation in Readers of Three Ages

WEST, RICHARD F., and STANOVICH, KEITH E. Automatic Contextual Facilitation in Readers of Three Ages. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 717-727. Fourth graders, sixth graders, and adults read words preceded by either a congruous, incongruous, or no-sentence context. Congruous contexts facilitated the reading times of all 3 groups. Incongruous contexts slowed the responses of the fourth and sixth graders, but not those of the adults. The same subjects completed another task, using similar materials, in which they had to name the color of the target word. The results of this and another control task indicated that context effects are mediated, at least in part, by automatic processes. However, the relative importance of these automatic contextual processes appears to decrease with age and reading ability as automatic word-recognition processes become more dominant.