Abstract
A lot of studies have been investigating factors influencing the success rate of lexical inferencing, but concreteness factor has been neglected. The aim of this study is to examine effects of concreteness on lexical inferencing. Four types of test were made to infer the meaning of: (a) concrete unknown words in concrete sentences, (b) abstract unknown words in concrete sentences, (c) concrete unknown words in abstract sentences, and (d) abstract unknown words in abstract sentences. The result revealed that concreteness of words did not influence the success rate of lexical inferencing, whereas the concrete context raised the success rate significantly more than the abstract context. Moreover, the result of questionnaire indicated that participants felt lexical inferencing from concrete sentences was easier than that from abstract sentences. These results imply that images created from contexts helped EFL students infer meanings of words. Therefore, a concrete rather than an abstract context should be used when we teach how to infer unknown words, so that students become more confident.
