Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Encountering unknown words disrupts reading and requires readers to rely on context to infer meaning. We investigate how contextual expectations (science-themed vs. daily-life narratives) and reader literacy modulate processing of unknown words. Using pseudowords as controlled proxies for unfamiliar lexical items, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading study (Experiment 2). To investigate how participants infer the meaning of pseudowords, each pseudoword was followed by a semantically associated word in the subsequent sentence. Across both methods, pseudowords elicited longer reading times. Crucially, eye-tracking results revealed that higher-literacy readers showed greater sensitivity to the semantically associated word, particularly in science-themed contexts. While both groups of readers showed attempts at reconstruct meaning in an offline task, higher-literacy readers mentioned unknown words themselves more frequently, which can be taken as evidence for incidental vocabulary learning. Together, these findings suggest that literacy supports strategic, context-sensitive processing of unknown words.