The collocation frequency of words in the language environment contributes to early vocabulary development. Vocabulary size, in turn, predicts children's reading comprehension skills later in development. Both collocation frequency and reading comprehension have been linked to inferential reasoning at different points in development. Here, it was hypothesized that 8-year-old children's (N = 147; 76 female) sensitivity to collocation frequency would be related to vocabulary size and reading comprehension skills of varying complexity.

Participants completed an auditory thematic judgment task to assess their sensitivity to collocation frequency (response accuracy or speed). In the task, children were presented with a short sentence containing a reference word (e.g., "John sees the cloud.") and asked to judge which of two subsequent words best fit the sentence (e.g., "rain" or "lip"). Semantic relatedness between reference and test words was based on a corpus-based analysis of collocation frequency.

Multilevel and mediation analyses confirmed that thematic judgment responses were related to corpus-based measures of collocation frequency, and were associated with vocabulary size and reading comprehension at the sentence and text levels. Furthermore, thematic judgment predicted vocabulary size and reading comprehension when controlling for the relationship between decoding and reading comprehension.

The study highlights the sensitivity of collocation frequency as a link between early language comprehension development (in terms of lexical retrieval and inference) and reading comprehension in middle childhood. It also integrates theoretical approaches from distributional semantics computational network analysis and behavioral experimental studies.