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Previous research indicates that word learning from auditory contexts may be more effective than written context at least through fourth grade. However, no study has examined contextual differences in word learning in older school-aged children when reading abilities are more developed. Here we examined developmental differences in children's ability to deduce the meanings of unknown words from the surrounding linguistic context in the auditory and written modalities and sought to identify the most important predictors of success in each modality. A total of 89 children aged 8-15 years were randomly assigned to either read or listen to a narrative that included eight novel words, with five exposures to each novel word. They then completed three posttests to assess word meaning inferencing. Children across all ages performed better in the written modality. Vocabulary was the only significant predictor of success on the word inferencing task. Results indicate support for written stimuli as the most effective modality for novel word meaning deduction. Our findings suggest that the presence of orthographic information facilitates novel word learning even for early, less proficient readers., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A vital and often overlooked aspect of word learning is the ability to establish deep semantic knowledge by adjusting and fine-tuning new word meanings as information becomes available. Here we studied differences in children's ability to update incorrect or incomplete word meanings by studying error types in a word inferencing task. The participants, 45 8- and 9-year-olds, read three sentences that all ended with the same nonsense word and were asked to identify the meaning of the last word. Importantly, the third sentence always provided the most useful information about the word's meaning. When children made errors, two types of responses were of interest. The first was when children gave a response that ignored the third sentence but fit one or two of the earlier ones. This suggests that the children had failed to update the meaning accurately. The second was when children were given enough information in the three sentences yet said that they were still unable to identify a word meaning. This suggests that the children would not attempt to infer a word when they were unsure of the answer. When controlling for number of correct responses, we found that children with smaller vocabularies were significantly more likely to fail to incorporate the third sentence, whereas children with large vocabularies were more likely to say that they were still unable to identify a meaning. These findings indicate that children with smaller vocabularies may be at risk of incorrectly inferring a new word's meaning rather than seeking further information to ensure accuracy., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) homes have significantly smaller vocabularies than their higher-SES peers, a gap that increases over the course of the school years. One reason for the increase in this vocabulary gap during the school years is that children from low-SES homes learn fewer words from context than their higher-SES peers. To better understand how the process of word learning from context might differ in children related to SES, we investigated changes in the N400 event-related potential (ERP) as children from low- and higher-SES homes learned new words using only the surrounding linguistic context. There were no differences in the N400 response to known words related to SES. In response to the target word being learned, children from higher-SES homes, like adults in previous studies, exhibited an attenuation of the N400 across exposures as they attached meaning to it. Children from low-SES homes did not show this same attenuation. These findings support previous work showing that children from low-SES homes may have differences or more variability in the neural components supporting language processing, and they extend previous work to illustrate how this variability may relate to word learning and, ultimately, vocabulary growth., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The relationship between children's slow vocabulary growth and the family's low socioeconomic status (SES) has been well documented. However, previous studies have often focused on infants or preschoolers and primarily used static measures of vocabulary at multiple time points. To date, there is no research investigating whether SES predicts a child's word learning abilities in grade school and, if so, what mediates this relationship. In this study, 68 children aged 8-15 years performed a written word learning from context task that required using the surrounding text to identify the meaning of an unknown word. Results revealed that vocabulary knowledge significantly mediated the relationship between SES (as measured by maternal education) and word learning. This was true despite the fact that the words in the linguistic context surrounding the target word are typically acquired well before 8 years of age. When controlling for vocabulary, word learning from written context was not predicted by differences in reading comprehension, decoding, or working memory. These findings reveal that differences in vocabulary growth between grade school children from low and higher SES homes are likely related to differences in the process of word learning more than knowledge of surrounding words or reading skills. Specifically, children from lower SES homes are not as effective at using known vocabulary to build a robust semantic representation of incoming text to identify the meaning of an unknown word., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)