The ability to learn new word meanings from context by school-age children with and without language comprehension difficulties

Morphological and contextual inferencing have both been found to be related to decoding, vocabulary, and reading comprehension skills.

“Morphological and contextual inferencing have largely been investigated separately in the literature on reading development, and both have been found to be related to decoding, vocabulary, and reading comprehension skills (e.g., Cain, Oakhill, & Elbro, 2003;McCutchen & Logan, 2011;Zhang & Shulley, 2017).”

Young readers can use context and morphology in their word meaning inferences.

“Our research confirms findings from the literature that young readers can use context and morphology in their word meaning inferences (e.g., Cain et al., 2003;Joseph & Nation, 2018;McCutchen & Logan, 2011;Ricketts et al., 2011;Zhang & Shulley, 2017)”

Earlier research has shown an association between contextual inferencing and reading comprehension.

“This is in line with earlier research showing an association between contextual inferencing and reading comprehension (e.g., Cain et al., 2003;Ricketts et al., 2011).”

Conceptual overlap between the cloze reading comprehension task and lexical inferencing is unlikely to fully explain the association between reading comprehension and contextual inferencing.

“However, as previous research has found an association between open-ended reading comprehension questions and lexical inferencing (Cain et al., 2003;Ricketts et al., 2011), conceptual overlap between the tasks is unlikely to fully explain the association.”