The effects of grammatical and semantic context in word reading, picture naming and congruency judgment tasks in children and in adults

This research explores the effects of semantic context and grammatical gender agreement on lexical access in three groups of subjects: adults, 9 and 10 year-old children, using three different on-line tasks: word reading, picture naming and congruency judgement. The dependent variable was the response time. Although both groups of children turn out to be slower than adults, the general profile of their performance overlaps the adult performance. In all groups large main effects of both sentence context and gender agreement were observed; the interaction between gender and semantics was significant; strong facilitation by both gender and semantics was observed in each task as well as a significant effect of task on subjects' performance. Qualitatively, effects of age were observed only in picture naming task performance of the different age groups. The findings of the present study are discussed within the framework of an interactive-activation model in which different sources of information are combined on-line in order to predict, anticipate, or pre-activate lexical targets. Results have implications for developmental studies on lexical access.