EFL読解において活性化された未知語推論の具体性とその強さ : 文脈の収束性と読解熟達度の影響

抄録

When L2 learners encounter unknown words in a text, they must narrow down the possible inferable meaning of those words based on contextual information. However, it remains uncertain how specific meaning is strongly inferred according to a context during reading. This study examined how the strength of contextual constraint affected the specificity of activated lexical inference and its activation level in a semantic relatedness judgment task with 52 Japanese undergraduates. Two kinds of contextual constraint were distinguished: those that strongly constrained the inferable meaning of unknown words and those that did not. The results showed the complicated effects of contextual constraint and L2 reading proficiency on lexical inference specificity and its activation level. Specifically, in the strong constraint context, high L2 proficiency learners strongly activated the specific meaning of target words, while low L2 proficiency learners could not narrow the possible meanings down to the specific ones during reading. In the weak constraint context, the general meaning of target words was strongly activated regardless of the learners' L2 reading proficiency. Together, these results suggest that teachers should understand the benefits of contextual constraint to the specificity of lexical inferences activated in reading comprehension for practical reading instructions.