Any reason why global vars are null within certain functions?

Hi, I'm having some trouble with one of my functions. On my game manager script i have a global array of GameObjects and an int:

  var word:GameObject[];               //an array of GameObjects
  var wordLength:int;                  //this is defined later and used for word.Length

And then on the same script I have written a function:

  function MyFunction(panelID:int, wordL:int){
      for(var p = 0; p < wordL; p++){
          if(word[p].GetComponent(PanelScript).matState == panelID){
              switch(panelID){
                  case 1:
                      word[p].GetComponent(PanelScript).StateChange(7);
                      break;
                  case 2:
                      word[p].GetComponent(PanelScript).StateChange(0);
                      break;
                  default:
                      print("DEFAULT");
                      break;
              }
          }
      }
  }

I am calling this function from a different script that is attached to each one of word[]'s GameObjects with this line:

  manager.GetComponent(ManagerScript).MyFunction(matState, arrSize);

arrSize on this script is an int equal to wordLength on the manager script. I would simply use wordLength within the function to loop thru the array, but for some reason it returns zero, causing the for loop to end before it starts.

So I passed in arrSize which holds the correct value in the function, but when I try to loop through word[], I get the "index out of range error" because it turns out word.Length also returns zero. At runtime word[] always shows the correct values in the inspector, and I have accessed it successfully in other functions, so why does MyFunction read it as zero?

Any help is greatly appreciated!