A Comparison of Using Three Different Types of Cues, Elaborated Context, Semantic Frames and Meaning Chains, in Disambiguating Polysemous Verbs

Abstract

As polysemy is encountered frequently in English as foreign language learning, FL learners’ ability to disambiguate polysemous verbs becomes critical to their comprehension in the target language. This thesis, accordingly, investigated how Iranian EFL learners achieved comprehension of English polysemous verbs by using three different types of cues: (1) elaborated context, (2) semantic frames, and (3) meaning chains. Participants were 49 university students in Zahedan who were randomly assigned to four conditions, the three cue conditions and a control no-cue condition. After reading the cues, participants completed a translation and a multiple-choice task and rated their confidence in their answers. The Results indicated that when only accuracy was taken into account and when accuracy and confidence ratings were jointly examined, only the elaborated context cue elicited significantly better performance than the control condition as measured in the multiple-choice task. As for the translation task, none of the three experimental cues generated significantly better results than the no-cue condition.