Lexical Knowledge and Word Recognition: Children’s Reading of Function Words

Abstract

This paper presents a series of experiments on children’s recognition of function words such as connectives and prepositions. The questions address: Is there a developmental difference in the recognition of content and function words? How available are words from the two word classes in reading? Is the difference in lexical availability of content and function words a matter of grammatical class or of meaningfulness? To what extent does the context affect the recognition of function words? Two lexical decision experiments are reported in which the availability of connectives and prepositions has been compared to that of content words. A third experiment involved a semantic categorization task, in which the subjects had to decide whether content and function words were referring to the concept of time or not, and in which function words were decided upon much more slowly. The fourth was a probe latency experiment in which the subjects had to decide whether a given word—a connective, a preposition, a verb, or a noun—had been part of a sentence previously presented. Finally, the fifth was an experiment on word recognition in context. The results showed a lower availability of function words as compared to content words. A second finding was that this lower availability may be, as least in part, more a matter of meaningfulness than of grammatical class, function words being characterized in general by less semantic content. A third conclusion was that context facilitates recognition of function words only at a higher age.