Word schemas : what do people know about words they don't know
William E. Nagy, Judith Ann Scott · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1989
This study explores the acquisition of word schemas, that is, implicit knowledge about patterns of word meaning in English which constrain the hypotheses that proficient word learners make about new words they encounter.Subjects in 7th and 10th grade, and college undergraduates, were asked to rate the plausibility of made-up definitions for nonsense words, some of which conformed to constraints on the semantic composition of English words, and others of which violated these constraints in various ways.Results show that by the time they reach college, students have gained an implicit knowledge of word schemas reflecting subtle regularities of English vocabulary, which they can use when evaluating possible meanings for new words.