Oral Definitions of Newly Learned Words

Abstract

This study examined and compared patterns of errors in the oral definitions of newly learned words. Fifteen 9- to 11-year-old children with language learning disability (LLD) and 15 typically developing age-matched peers inferred the meanings of 20 nonsense words from four novel reading passages. After reading, children provided oral definitions for target words. Oral definition errors were categorized and proportions were computed. Results indicated that the LLD and typical groups showed similar error proportions in indeterminate ( p = .055), false ( p = .506), and semantic ( p = .370) categories. Different error proportions were found for phonological ( p = .048), sentence ( p = .031), substitution ( p = .001), and syntactic ( p = .023) categories. Similar patterns of errors were found for frontier and unknown words for the LLD group. These patterns provided evidence that children with LLD have difficulty gaining partial word knowledge during reading tasks.