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Abstract This study explores students' word schemas, that is, their knowledge not just of specific words, but also about words in general that can be applied when they encounter new words. Students in 7th and 10th grade and college undergraduates were asked to rate the plausibility of made-up definitions for nonsense words. Some of the definitions, although nonexistent or extremely rare, represented plausible meanings. Other definitions, however, were constructed to violate hypothesized expectations about possible meanings of English words. Students at all grade levels were found to distinguish plausible from less plausible meanings. College undergraduates also displayed sensitivity to part of speech distinctions in a subset of the items for which the range of possible meanings was hypothesized to be different for nouns and verbs. Results show that word schemas are applied in evaluating hypotheses about possible meanings of new words and that skilled adult readers are sensitive to subtle regularities in the English lexicon.
Nagy et al. (1990) studied this question.