Consulting on-Line Dictionary Information While Reading

Electronic documents allow readers to access definitions of unfamiliar words by clicking on the screen display. Five studies report eight comparisons which explore how changing the modality (visual/auditory) and form (verbal/graphic) of the defining information influences people's willingness to consult definitions while reading short stories. Study 1 gave verbal definitions of words that were completely novel and explored the effects of definition length and reading task. It was found that readers checked the meanings of nearly all the unknown words. This remained the case in study 2 where auditory rather than visual definitions were given; but people re-read more stories than in Study 1 suggesting gist comprehension may have been impaired by mixing modalities. In study 3 the defined words were familiar but not always precisely understood (e.g. architrave). Here people consulted significantly fewer definitions regardless of whether these included pictures. Study 4 visually cued the defined architectural terms within the text and found significantly more definitions were read. In study 5 these defined terms were listed in a separate glossary alongside the text. This affected both the frequency and pattern with which readers consulted definitions. Overall, this series of studies shows that, unless readers recognise words as novel, their willingness to consult definitions depends on how the definitions are made available.