The Comprehension Of New Words In Sentence-Level

The present study explores how a new word in different sentential contexts is comprehended in a speedy reading condition so as to probe into the interaction between lexical access and contextual information in Chinese EFL learners.165 Senior Three students of Luoyuan No.1 High School participated in the experiment.The results reveal that different new word categories and different new word positions in strong-biased sentences can lead to different correctness rates of the new word meaning access.In other words,the results show a significant main effect of lexical category as well as word position,which indicates that Chinese EFL learners can access the contextually appropriate meanings of new words in strong-biased and high-constraint sentential context.Also,the results suggest that the interaction of lexical category and word position reaches significance.That is,with different unknown word categories in the same position or with the same unknown word category in different positions in strong-biased sentences, the correctness rate of the new word meaning comprehension differs.To be more exact, the meaning of an unknown noun or adjective can be understood or accessed in almost the same way when it appears in the different positions of a sentence(the sentence-final position and the sentence-initial position) while significant difference is discovered when EFL learners comprehend new verbs in both positions in a sentence.