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Abstract

Highly skilled, skilled, and less-skilled third and fourth graders (N = 30) predicted the random occurrence of left or right arrows. For all subjects, reaction times (RTs) to correctly predicted events were faster than RTs to incorrectly predicted events. However, the difference in RT between correctly and incorrectly predicted events was larger for the less-skilled readers than for the other subjects. No other group differences, e.g., error rates or prediction accuracy, were found. The results extend a basic finding in the adult literature to younger subjects and suggest that reading-related differences in context effects may be related to differences in basic processing rather than specific difficulties in processing linguistic information.

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Effects of Context in Simple Stimulus Identification: Reading-Related Differences

Abstract

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