THE ROLE OF CONTEXT AND DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS ON VARYING LEVELS OF WORD KNOWLEDGE

THE AUTHORS examined the contextual and definitional factors that dete rmine whether and to what extent college students learn unknown words without instruction. The 186 subjects were randomly assigned to four c ombinations of weak or strong context and adequate or inadequate dicti onary definitions. Subjects studied 10 nonce nouns for 20 minutes, the n took four different tests, lapping varying levels of word knowledge. The results indicated that, first, there was no interaction between t he context and dictionary definition variables. Second, in a test for main effects, the only significance found for the context variable was on the dependent measure that asked subjecs to identify examples. Tho se in the strong context condition performed better than those receivi ng weak context. The main finding of the study focused on the definiti on variable: For ail four tests, those who had the adequate dictionary condition performed better than those who received the inadequate def inition, indicating that the quality of the definition appears to dete rmine the extent to which college students are able to learn unknown w ords.