NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Experimental Evidence: Learning from “Internal Context”

Some experimental work has been carried out in order to address the question of whether
individuals use “internal context” in figuring out word meanings (Kaye & Stemberg,
1984). Kaye and Stemberg (1984) tested a total of 108 secondary school and college
students. Each subject was exposed to 85 very low frequency prefixed words that were
selected each to contain 1 of 15 commonly used Latin stems. Each word was paired with
four possible definitions, one of which was correct and three of which were incorrect. One
of the incorrect definitions retained the meaning of the prefix only, one retained the
meaning of the stem only and one retained the meaning of neither the prefix nor the stem.
An example of an item in the word-definitions task was the following: “exsect” means
(a) to cut out (totally correct); (b) to throw out (prefix only correct); (c ) to cut against
(stem only correct); (d) to throw against (totally incorrect).

The results suggested that college students, but not high school students, were able to use
“internal context” to help infer word meanings. The pattern of results suggested that the
word stem was the central focus for determining what each of the various words meant,
with the prefix modifying this stem meaning.

More recently, Shu, Anderson and Zhang (1995) examined the role both of the “internal”
and “external” context in acquiring word meanings. In a study involving American and
Chinese children in third and fifth grades, they investigated children’s natural learning of
word meanings while reading. The children read one of two cross translated stories and
then completed a test on the difficult words in both the story they read and the one they
did not read. A checklist test was used to examine children’s knowledge of target words
before reading. Multiple choice tests were constructed to measure children’s word
knowledge after reading.

The results showed significant incidental learning of word meanings, in both grades and
both countries. In each country, incidental word learning appeared on both easy and
difficult test questions and among children of all levels of ability. For children from both
cultures, the strength of contextual support in the stories and the conceptual difficulty of
words affected learning. The morphological transparency of words influenced word

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