The role of context in language is so obvious that, paradoxically, it often goes unnoticed by students who are studying it. Newspaper headlines (real and contrived) can be used to demonstrate to students the context dependency of language. The simplest version of such a demonstration takes 5 minutes; the longest version takes about 20 minutes.…

Sixteen third grade students, 16 college students, and 16 older adults performed a lexical decision (word-nonword) task to determine age-related differences in the magnitude of contextual priming effects. Context length and target quality (intact versus degraded) were within subject manipulations. A significant Age X Context Length X…