2023 Volume 184 Pages 81-96
The present study investigates the lexical inferencing on the unknown subordinate senses of Japanese polysemous verbs by Chinese learners of Japanese, focusing on the effects of L2 proficiency, semantic overlap and contextual richness. The results revealed that: 1) for high-overlap senses in rich context, mid-level and high-level learners achieved a higher degree of inferencing accuracy than low-level learners; for high-overlap senses in less-rich context, half of the unknown words were inferred correctly and mid-level and high-level learners achieved a higher degree of inferencing accuracy than low-level learners; for low-overlap senses in rich context, half of the unknown words were inferred correctly and the effect of L2 proficiency was observed; for low-overlap senses in less-rich context, inferencing was difficult regardless of L2 proficiency. In addition, regardless of L2 proficiency: 2) the degree of inferencing accuracy was higher for high-overlap senses than low-overlap senses; 3) the degree of inferencing accuracy was higher in rich context than less-rich context.
