Deriving Word Meaning from Written Context: A Multicomponential Skill

A cross‐sectional study with Dutch first‐language learners from grade 2, 4, and 6 was conducted to investigate their ability to derive word meaning from context. We used a multicomponential measure that involved the percentage of correct attributes, inclusion of a false attribute, and contextualization. Students' definitions were either wrong, fully correct, only partially correct, or both wrong and (partially) correct at the same time. Students experienced additional problems in formulating a word definition decontextualized from the original text. These findings suggest that the incremental nature of vocabulary growth involves adding correct attributes, deleting false attributes, and decontextualizing students' word definitions. The ability to derive word meaning from context depended on grade and concreteness of concepts.