The development of language context use: The role of executive functions.

People use context to assign meaning to unknown or ambiguous words. The factors involved in ambiguity resolution have been explored extensively in adults (for a review see Simpson, 1994). However, more research is needed to examine how young children (6--10 years) resolve ambiguities. Previous work indicates successful ambiguity resolution skills rely on adequate working memory and inhibition skills, (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992; Gernsbacher, 1993). However, these cognitive resources are not completely developed in young children (Brocki & Bohlin, 2004). Through a series of experiments, I compared the ability of children of different ages and adults to assign meaning to ambiguous words. In Experiments 1 (2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade children) and 2 (adults), auditory sentences were presented that supported one or the other meanings of an ambiguous word (or neither meaning). The ability to use context appropriately was measured in two ways. First, if participants appropriately comprehended the sentence, related targets should be named faster than semantically unrelated targets. Second, after the target word was named, participants made a relatedness judgment to indicate whether or not the target was related to the sentence that he/she heard). Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that young participants (2nd and 3rd graders) were not as good at assigning the context-appropriate meaning of ambiguous words as the 4th grade and adult participants. I hypothesized that executive functioning (e.g., working memory and/or inhibition) skills in the younger participants limited their ability to utilize context. Executive function requirements were minimized in Experiment 3 and 4 via a single word context. Again, naming latencies and relatedness judgments were measured. In addition, each participant's working memory span and inhibition skill were recorded. The results of these experiments revealed that both the younger participants and the adult participants were able to appropriately evaluate context during meaning selection for the ambiguous words. Furthermore, both working memory span and inhibition engagement were related to successful context-use. These findings support a developmental model in which context-use increases with age, cognitive processing capacity, and reading skill.PhDCognitive psychologyDevelopmental psychologyExperimental psychologyPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126191/2/3237993.pd