Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study is concerned with the issue of whether word meanings are mentally represented in a decontextualized form, similar to dictionary definitions. If this assumption is correct then students should understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word when they read its definition. To test this hypothesis, German high school students were given unfamiliar English words and their monolingual English dictionary entries. Students used each target word in an English sentence, and then translated their sentences into German. The translations permitted the assessment of comprehension and the specification of its underlying components. The results indicate that students often did not understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word even though they did "understand" its definition. Information that specified in which contexts an entry word and its definition are synonymous promoted comprehension. Meaning representations are therefore best conceived of as contextual representations.