NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Although the cues are at present listed in terms of the sorts of information that a given
context can provide about X (the unknown word), each of these cues can alternatively be
used to refer to the sort of information that X (the unknown word) provides about Y
(another word or concept in the passage).

In order to concretize the previous descriptive framework, Stemberg and Powell (1983)
use the following example. Consider the sentence: “At dawn the “blen” arose on the
horizon and shone brightly”. This sentence contains several contextual cues that could
facilitate one’s inferring that blen probably means sun. “At dawn” provides a temporal
cue, describing when the arising of the blen occurred; “arose” provides a functional
descriptive cue, describing an action that a “blen” could perform; “on the horizon”
provides a spatial cue, describing where the arising of the blen took place; “shone”
provides another functional descriptive cue describing a second action a “blen” could do;
finally “brightly” provides a Stative descriptive cue, describing a property (brightness) of
the shinning of the “blen”. With all these different cues, it is no wonder that most people
would find it very easy to figure out that the neologism “blen” is a synonym for the
familiar word sun.

However, no claim can be made that these categories are mutually exclusive, or
independent in their functioning. On the other hand, it cannot be argued that they
represent a true categorisation of context cues. Nevertheless, this classification scheme
has been found to be useful in understanding strategies in deriving meanings of words
from context. It should also to be noted that not every type of cue will be present in every
context, and even when a given cue is present, the theory proposes that the usefulness of
the cue will be mediated by the sorts of variables to be described in the next section.

Mediating variables

Whereas the contextual cues can specify the particular kinds of information that might be
available for an individual to use to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words, the
mediating variables specify those variables that can affect, either positively or negatively,
the application of contextual cues present in a given situation. The mediating variables for
external context include:

(a) The number of occurrences of an unknown word;

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