Abstract of

Understanding the Definitions of Unfamiliar Verbs

Judith A. Scott

William E. Nagy

Two experiments examined students' ability to understand definitions of novel verbs. In both experiments, upper elementary students were given definitions of pseudowords paired with sentences using those words, and asked to evaluate whether the use of the word in the sentence was consistent with the meaning given in the definition. The sentence was either appropriate for the definition, consistent with a fragment of the definition but not the definition as a whole (fragment selection error), or completely inconsistent with the definition. Fragment selection error sentences were intended to represent a frequently made error observed in previous research in which children had been asked to generate sentences based on definitions. In the first experiment 60 fourth-grade participants were able to correctly judge appropriate or completely inconsistent sentences accurately, but incorrectly judged sentences containing fragment selection error sentences as consistent with the definitions about 50% of the time, indicating a chance level of performance on such items. In the second experiment 55 fourth-grade and 45 sixth-grade students were administered the same task with three types of definitions: traditional definitions, traditional definitions with an example sentence, and innovative definitions written in an informal and presumably more user-friendly style. Provision of example sentences produced a statistically significant but small improvement in performance for fragment selection error sentences, but for both grade levels, all levels of verbal ability, and all three definition types, students' judgments about these sentences were not substantially different from chance. Results indicate that students' difficulties with definitions observed in previous research using a writing task are not limited to this task; nor can they be attributed to unfamiliarity with the format of traditional definitions. Rather, students appear to experience fundamental difficulties using information provided in definitions about general syntactic or semantic categories of new words.

Abstract from Scott, J.A., & Nagy, W.E. (1997). Understanding the Definitions of Unfamiliar Verbs. Reading Research Quarterly, 32(2), 184–200. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.32.2.4