A Narwhal Is an Animal: Partial Word Knowledge Biases Adults' Decisions

Authors: Lockett J.N.¹; Shore W.J.²

Source: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Volume 32, Number 4, July 2003 , pp. 477-496(20)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Adults' accuracy on a sentence verification task was measured to assess reliable biases in their responses as a function of their level of knowledge about the target words, as well as adults' ability to reject incorrect ontological category membership for their partially known words. Three levels of word knowledge (known, frontier, and unknown) were assessed in two experiments. Results indicated that participants were conservative decision-makers about sentences using the vocabulary words and that the conservative bias increased in strength as their level of knowledge about the target word increased. When biased guessing was discouraged, results indicated that participants were able to accurately identify both correct and incorrect sentences using targets at all three levels of knowledge, including their partially known words, but were least reliable at rejecting false sentences using unknown targets. Implications for the role of “knowing not” in adults' vocabulary acquisition are discussed.

Keywords: Partial knowledge; “knowing not”; vocabulary acquisition

Language: English

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University of North Carolina at Charlotte, North Carolina 2: Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington. shorewj@plu.edu

Publication date: 2003-07-01