Effect of Context on Deriving Meanings of Unknown Words

In order to further explore the effect of context on deriving the meanings of unknown words and the features of contextual types,17 students,chosen randomly from departments of a teacher's college in Anhui province,participated in the present study which consists of 4 experimental tasks-cloze test,target word knowledge test,introspective meaning guessing and follow-up interviews.The findings are as follows:(1) The meanings of unknown target words identified in the word-only condition were increased by 29% in context through guessing,and the distribution of scores of target words obtained in cloze test corresponds with the trend of scores of target words obtained in guessing during reading;(2)Target words,to some extent,can adjust the effect of context;(3)Various contextual types,with different guiding effects on lexical inferencing,exist in the experimental passage,and the dominant source of misdirective contexts is the misinterpretation of syntactic structures of linguistic context.