Partial knowledge in vocabulary acquisition: General constraints and specific detail.

The authors investigated the relationship of partial word knowledge and instruction by asking subjects to choose, from a pair of sentences, the correct use of a target word that they had or had not looked up in a dictionary. When the correct sentence of the pair could be chosen on the basis of general semantic constraints, subjects performed well even for words they had dented were part of their language, and instruction had no effect. Studying dictionary definitions did, however, increase the amount of specific, detailed information available in memory. Researchers have speculated on the role of partial word knowledge in the area of reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition and on the exact characteristics of words (e.g., Beck, McKeown, & Omanson, 1987; Dale, 1965; Loewenthal, 1971; Loewenthal & Gibbs, 1974; Trembly, 1966). Three general levels of word knowledge can be identified: One may know nothing at all about the word's meaning; one may have complete knowledge of the word's meaning; or knowledge may fall between these two extremes. Different researchers have operationalized these levels of word knowledge in different ways, especially the intermediate level of familiarity where some, but not complete, knowledge is assumed. Like Loewenthal (1971), we identified words about which the reader has no knowledge as unknown*' words. According to Dale (1965), these are words to which the reader responds, never saw the word before.* At the other extreme, words that constitute the expressive vocabulary were classified as known words (Dale, 1965; Loewenthal, 1971). In addition to these two extremes of word knowledge, there is a somewhat nebulous intermediate level that has been defined in a variety of ways. One of the clearest conceptualizations of this level is given by Dale (1965) and again by Trembly (1966). Dale characterized this level by the statement, know there is such a word, but I don't know what it means. Such words have been encountered in some form, most likely in the context of reading or listening. Trembly labeled this type as words because they exist at the frontier of the learner's knowledge. We have adopted Trembly's nomenclature in our discussion of this intermediate level of word knowledge. Hence, our study focuses on three levels of word knowledge: unknown, frontier, and known.