ERIC Number: EJ1432716
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Jul
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0034-0553
EISSN: EISSN-1936-2722
Learning to Read Connections--Sensitivity to Collocation Frequency Links Vocabulary Size and Reading Comprehension in Middle Childhood
Alexandra M. A. Schmitterer; Caterina Gawrilow; Claudia Friedrich
Reading Research Quarterly, v59 n3 p448-467 2024
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.
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Reading Comprehension, Language Usage, Young Children, Reading Skills, Correlation
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/m9fbw/