Individual Differences in the Inference of Word Meanings From Context: The Influence of Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary Knowledge, and Memory Capacity.
By K. Cain, Jane Oakhill, Kate Lemmon. 2004
579 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was related to performance, but short-term memory span and memory for the literal content of the text were not. Children with poor reading comprehension were not impaired in learning novel vocabulary taught through direct instruction, but children with both weak reading comprehension and vocabulary were. Implications for the relation between vocabulary development and text comprehension are discussed.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/665b6a894fa85312a56b085c7898f310d14cb22b
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
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Citations in the corpus
- Morphological Awareness: A Key to Understanding Poor Reading Comprehension in English. (2011, background): “Unexpected poor comprehenders are poor at inferring the meaning of new words from context (Cain et al., 2004), at consolidating the meaning of newly acquired words (Ricketts, Bishop, & Nation, 2008), and in retaining information in working memory (Cain, 2006; Yuill, Oakhill, & Parkin, 1989).”
- The Role of Inference Making and Other Language Skills in the Development of Narrative Listening Comprehension in 4–6‐Year‐Old Children (2012, background): “A study by Cain, Oakhill, and Lemmon (2004) showed that children with both poor vocabulary and poor reading comprehension were impaired at inferring the meanings of novel words from context.”
- Adaptive training leads to sustained enhancement of poor working memory in children. (2009, background): “Interestingly, IQ did not show a comparable boost with training, indicating that although WM and IQ are undoubtedly related (Kane & Engle, 2002; Jaeggi, Buschkuel, Jonides & Perrig, 2008), its contribution to learning can be distinguished in struggling learners (Cain et al., 2004).”
- Dissecting the relationship between language skills and learning to read: Semantic and phonological contributions to new vocabulary learning in children with poor reading comprehension (2007, background): “Cain et al. (2004) replicated and extended these findings by showing that those poor comprehenders with relatively weak receptive vocabulary knowledge, as measured by the British Picture Vocabulary Scale, were also less able to learn new vocabulary items from direct instruction.”