Objectives: When we read texts, it is necessary to access the meanings of various words. During this process, the meanings related to the context are facilitated, and the meanings unrelated to that context are suppressed. This study investigated whether children differ from young adults in the processing of ambiguous verbs. Methods: This study was conducted with 25 children in 5th to 6th grade and 17 young adults. Response accuracy and reaction time were measured using a sensicality judgment task, where the participant judges if a sentence makes sense, or is nonsense, after reading it. This task was divided into consistent and inconsistent conditions depending on the consistency of meaning of ambiguous verbs in the priming and the target sentences. Results: Both children and adults showed lower accuracy and slower response times in the inconsistent condition than in the consistent condition. Children showed lower accuracy and slower response times than adults in both conditions. Children showed remarkably low accuracy in the inconsistent condition. Conclusion: Children performed poorly compared to adults in reading comprehension, but tended to use contexts to process word meanings like adults. However, they showed difficulty suppressing information irrelevant to the context of sentences. It means that premature suppression ability can cause failures in reading comprehension for children.

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Poor comprehenders lack vocabulary knowledge and have inefficient meaning processing abilities, which negatively affects their reading comprehension. This study investigated if poor comprehenders differ from good comprehenders when processing the meanings of compound nouns. Methods: The participants were 10 poor comprehenders and 10 good comprehenders in 3-5 grade. Accuracy and the response times were measured while children performed a priming lexical decision task. In this task, compound nouns were divided into high and low frequency conditions, and priming words were divided into conditions related to the modifier of the compound noun (modifier condition) and conditions related to the head of the compound noun (head condition). Results: Poor comprehenders showed lower accuracy and longer response times than good comprehenders. Both groups showed lower accuracy and longer response time in the low frequency condition than the high frequency condition. Also, both groups showed shorter response times in the head condition than the modifier condition. However, in case of the poor comprehenders, accuracy was significantly lower under the low frequency modifier condition, and response times were significantly longer under the low frequency condition. Conclusion: Overall, poor comprehenders had difficulty in processing the meaning of compound nouns. This could be a result of weak organization of semantic networks in their mental lexicon. In addition, it could be affected by a lack of understanding of syntactic structures and the semantic relations of compound nouns.

Objectives: Elaborative inference is the integration of a text and the reader's knowledge; it facilitates comprehension and allows readers to more easily learn the information contained within the text. The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of instrument inference (a type of elaborative inference) in poor comprehenders. Methods: The participants were 15 poor comprehenders and 15 normally developing children in 3rd to 6th grade. The children were asked to decide if target words (instrument words) were words or nonwords after reading sentences including the cue to infer instrument while measuring their reaction time. In this lexical decision task, the target words were divided into two conditions: the related condition between sentences and instruments words (related condition) and the unrelated condition between sentences and instrument words (unrelated condition). Results: Normally developing children reacted faster in the related condition than the unrelated condition; on the other hand, poor comprehenders showed no significant difference between the two conditions. Conclusion: Unlike normally developing children, poor comprehenders failed to infer instruments in real time while reading. From this result, it can be explained that poor comprehenders have difficulty in processing implicit information while reading texts because they assign most of their comprehension resources to processing the literal information in the text.

For school-aged children, writing is an important means of communication and scholastic achievement; nevertheless, children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have difficulty writing. Thus, this research studied how the length of story, which is one factor influencing writing, affected writing of children with ADHD. Methods: Sixteen children with ADHD and 16 normally-developing children in 3rd to 4th grade elementary school participated in the study. After listening to short and long stories they were asked to rewrite those stories and their writings were analyzed. Results: Children with ADHD wrote less in terms of quantity than the normally-developing children in the long story condition, but not in the short story condition. When analyzing the writing composition of both groups, the children with ADHD performed worse regardless of the length of the story. Syntactic complexity created no significant difference between the two groups, but both groups produced more complex syntax after the long story condition. In addition, both groups produced more sentences with syntactic errors after the long story condition and the children with ADHD made more sentences with syntactic errors in both conditions. Lastly, the children with ADHD produced more spelling errors in both conditions. Conclusion: When children with ADHD write a long story, they write less in terms of quantity than normally-developing children, which could explain why they write poorly. However, even when they can write equal quantity with normally-developing children, children with ADHD demonstrate poorer writing composition and produce more errors. These results are discussed in relationship to the characteristics of cognitive process.