When readers unlock words through their use in the sentence, they use this cueing system:

• A. Syntactic
• B. Phonological
• C. Semantic
• D. Graphophonic

Answer: (C)

Context and meaning guide readers to figure out unfamiliar words. This uses semantic cueing, which relies on the sense of the sentence and what we know about the world to deduce a word’s meaning. When you hear or read a sentence and infer a word from how it fits with the surrounding words and the overall idea, you’re tapping into meaning-based clues rather than just sounds or grammar.

Phonological cueing focuses on how a word sounds and how letters map to those sounds, while graphophonic cueing is about decoding letter-sound relationships. Syntactic cueing uses sentence structure and grammatical role to guess a word. The hint here—unlocking a word through its use in the sentence—points to using meaning and context to determine the word’s sense.