GRAMMATICAL PRIMING OF VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION IN 4TH-GRADE CHILDREN

Previous work examining context effects in children has been limited t o semantic context. The current research examined the effects of gramm atical priming of word-naming in fourth-grade children. In Experiment 1, children named both inflected and uninflected noun and verb target words faster when they were preceded by grammatically constraining pri mes than when they were preceded by neutral primes. Experiment 1 used a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) interval of 750 msec. Experimen t 2 replicated the grammatical priming effect at two SOA intervals (40 0 msec and 700 msec), suggesting that the grammatical priming effect d oes not reflect the operation of any gross strategic effects directly attributable to the long SOA interval employed in Experiment 1. Gramma tical context appears to facilitate target word naming by constraining target word class. Further work is required to elucidate the loci of this effect.