The Role of Morphological and Contextual Information in L2 Lexical Inference

Abstract

This study investigated the role of morphological and contextual information in inferring the meaning of unknown L2 words during reading. Four groups of college‐level ESL students, beginning (n = 34), intermediate (n = 27), high‐intermediate (n = 21), and advanced (n = 25), chose the inferred meanings of 20 pseudo compounds (e.g., rainfime) from multiple choice options. The pseudo compounds were presented in a set of sentences. In the Morphology Reliable condition, the known word part in the pseudo compounds provided semantic information about the meaning of the compounds, which also matched the context of the sentences. In the Morphology Unreliable condition, the known word part did not provide any reliable semantic information nor did it match the context. The critical answer options were the meanings based on morphological information and the meanings based on contextual information. Results indicated significant differences in the choice of answers between the groups only in the Morphology Unreliable condition: The beginning‐level learners relied more on morphological information even though the meanings based on morphology were incorrect. The study discusses the underlying processes in the choice of information used in lexical inference during reading.