The Influence of Writer Vocabulary Selections on Reader Comprehension

Factors that Prevent Context-based Semantic Inference

Abstract

This paper examines how the writer's choices of vocabulary affect the reader's comprehension, based on data collected with the XML-based Essay Correction System (XECS) which shows how different examiners corrected compositions by the same learner. Previous research involving error judgements for example sentences has suggested that vocabulary errors have a major impact on semantic comprehension, but in actual learner compositions, the use of a word with an inappropriate meaning rarely renders the composition totally incomprehensible. Many vocabulary errors involve inappropriate collocations, and much of the time the meaning can be inferred from the context. Rather than using a word with the wrong meaning, what seems to prevent semantic inference the most are failures to specify the relations between phrases, leaving several competing interpretations with no clear clues to discriminate among them.