A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Word Guessing Using Cloze Procedures

Abstract

This paper is concerned with three psychological aspects of word guessing: (a) "contextual constrainf'of texts, (b) "decontextualization"of contextual cues and (c) "problem-solving strategies"for word guessing. An experiment was carried out in which subjects were asked to infer words in cloze procedures, and they were also asked to report on how they came to infer the words. An analysis of these self-reports suggests (a) word guessing should be viewed as a complex interplay among the above three elements and English proficiency of learners; (b) heuristic and procedural strategies should be recognized as characteristic of low and high proficiency learners; and (c) word guessing should be related to the question of how deeply people understand textual contents as well as the English ability of learners. These findings will be discussed in conjunctions with several issues of word guessing and word acquisition.