A Study of Word Meaning Acquisition of Polysemous Words for English Majors

This study investigates the word meaning acquisition of polysemous words for English majors by the way of questionnaire and two word meaning tests. The conclusions are drawn as follows: providing primary meaning to students can help them guess the extended meaning of unfamiliar polysemous words than providing the other extended meanings; the English majors at different language proficiency level show similar acquisition effects in primary meaning but different acquisition effects in the extended meanings. Therefore, in vocabulary instruction, if the word meaning acquisition sequence can be followed and the connections of word meanings can be cherished, the word meaning instruction outcome will be more efficient.


Introduction
The meaning of language is the center of human communication, and the study of it has a long history in the philosophy of language, linguistics, psychology, and literature.Polysemy is an ordinary linguistic phenomenon, which is the result of word meanings extension (Cuyckens, 1997).With the development of the society, old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their meanings.Actually, adding new meanings to the already-existing words is the most economical way to satisfy people's needs of expression, which is simpler and more convenient than creating new words or borrowing words from other languages.With the passage of time, the primary meaning and extended meanings coexist in the language.
To study polysemous words, it is very necessary to know the relation between the primary meaning and extended meanings, how the extended meanings derive from the primary meaning and what the core meaning is.
As to primary meaning, Hatch & Brown (2001) claim that primary meanings are those which are most central for a set of polysemes (words with the same form but slightly different meanings).For example, the primary meaning of "break" is that of breaking an object such as a cup, not the breaking of waves on the shore.Durkin & Manning (1989) use the dominant meaning instead of the primary meaning.They think that the dominant meaning of a polysemous word is taken to be that comes most readily to mind for a majority of native speakers when the word is resented without biasing context.
Word meaning is prevalent in language.It is one of the most difficult parts in vocabulary learning, especially for the English learners (Zhou, 2003).According to the statistics, in English, over 40% of words have more than one meaning (McCarthy, 1997;Durkin & Manning, 1989).For example, if English majors look up a word in a dictionary, they usually don't know which meaning is the appropriate one.In reading, the English majors who are familiar with one of the meanings of the word do not abandon the meaning even though it does not make any meaning in the context (Laufer, 1996).With regard to meaning discrimination, words with multiple meanings induced the largest number of errors in comprehension of words and learners performed far more badly on guessing the meanings of the words than on guessing the meanings of other words.In addition, even the advanced learners seldom knew all the meanings of a polysemous word and that learning them was a slow and patchy process (Hulstijn, 1998(Hulstijn, , 2001)).
Since the late 1980s, researchers have begun to show great interest in lexical acquisition.A variety of theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted, for example, the investigation of the effects of learning strategies on lexical acquisition, the study on the relationship between active vocabulary and passive vocabulary, and the research into the relationship between the breadth and depth of the vocabulary knowledge in reading.
However, over the past few decades, the studies of vocabulary acquisition mainly focused on measuring the volume of vocabulary, vocabulary learning strategies as well as the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and language proficiency (Durkin & Manning, 1989).Little empirical work has been undertaken toward characterizing the properties of word meanings and gauging language users' perceptions of the relative status of the different word meanings.In an experimental study of polysemous words in Dutch students, providing students with core meaning resulted in better guessing and long-term retention of figurative meanings of polysemous words (Verspoor & Lowie, 2001).In China, there are a few studies of word meaning acquisition but these studies are mostly descriptive and the experimental studies into the acquisition of certain word meaning by non-English majors.Therefore, it is necessary to explore the meanings acquisition of polysemous words for English majors in China.
The study aims to explore the acquisition of word meanings for English majors in the following three aspects: 1) Whether the English majors at same language proficiency provided with a primary meaning gain better guessing of extended meanings of words than those provided with other extended meanings?2) Whether the English majors have significant difference in primary meaning of a word? 3) Whether the English majors have significant difference in direct meaning of a word?The study explores the acquisition of word meanings for English majors in China and may add something to previous researches and some implications to language teaching, textbooks writing and dictionary compiling.

Participants
The participants for this study were 40 full-time registered third-year undergraduate English majors having passed TEM-4, 40 full-time registered postgraduate English majors having passed TEM-8.The reasons for choosing the above English majors of different language proficiency is the fact that they had received enough amount of English training so that they were competent to notice the problem of various word meanings.As English majors, they need to enlarge their vocabulary enormously and efficiently, especially word meaning.

Instruments
A number of field procedures have been used for collecting information for language learning research, such as questionnaires, interviews, tests and observations.Guided by the theoretical consideration of fieldwork methodology, the instruments used in this study are the questionnaire for the English majors and the two word meaning tests.The tests can also be used to help place students in the proper class level (placement test).Word meaning test is believed to be a useful element in a well-run language teaching program, providing teacher and learner with useful information that can serve each as a basis for improvement.

The English Majors' Questionnaire
At the beginning of the class, a brief introduction about the questionnaire was made, including the purpose, the content and the time arrangement as well as same related requirements.Particularly, it was stressed that the results of the students' questionnaire would be only used for the research and had no connection with their academic performance.In this way, the students felt relaxed about this study and the questionnaire papers were collected within 20 minutes.
The questionnaire mainly concerned about the three aspects: the present situation of polysemy acquisition, especially word meanings in English classes (Questions 1 -6), the situation of word meaning acquisition after class (Questions 7 -10) and their attitudes and suggestions toward word meaning acquisition (Questions 11 -16).

The Two Word Meanings Tests
The first test, word meaning inference, was to infer the contextual meanings of the target words based on the input information in the sentences in which the target words were embedded.Different groups of the participants performed this task under different experimental conditions.During the guessing, the students in each condition have to guess the meanings of the 10 target words.The participants were provided with worksheets containing 10 pairs of sentences and they were instructed to guess and give a precise Chinese translation of extended meanings of 10 underlined polysemous English words in the sentences.The sentences containing the word to be guessed were identical for the two groups, but the cue sentences were different.Primary meaning-cued group was given a sentence with a primary meaning of the word and its literal translation into Chinese as cue while non-primary meaning group was given a sentence with another extended meaning of the word and its Chinese equivalent as cue.For example, for the primary meaning-cued group, the study provided them with the following sentences: 1) Down by the river, an owl bannowed among the trees.
2) The driver bannowed at the dog in the road.But for the non-primary meaning cued group, we provided them with the following sentences: 3) The crowd bannowed and jeered at the speaker.
4) The driver bannowed at the dog in the road.
The second sentences for both groups were identical, and the only difference existed in the cue sentences, one with a primary meaning and the other with an extended meaning.The English majors were asked to give a precise Chinese translation to the underlined words in the second sentences.They were encouraged to give their answers as accurately as possible.
The choice of testing words in the test one was made on the basis of two criteria.First, each of the polysemous words has at least three different meanings, a primary meaning, an extended meaning, and another extended meaning.Second, these polysemous words are unknown to all the participants.The words were chosen by the author's reference to Collins COBUILD English Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary.All the words were presented to participants in a sentence context.Some of the sentences including the target words were selected from the dictionaries and some of them made up by the author.Although a text context should be preferred to a sentence context in teaching situation, a sentence context was used in the experiment to control for any extra elaboration opportunities a text context would provide.All the 10 words chosen were low frequency words (i.e., the frequency of encountering is very low during their normal readings), which ensured that the words to be tested were unknown to students so that their guessing ability of these words could be tested.
To ensure that the students were not familiar with the experimental words, all the words were identified by the teachers at the two classes from which participants were taken and the teachers were asked to check whether any of the testing words had been taught or whether they were considered familiar to the students.And then a pilot test with 10 items was carried out with a different group of 34 participants who were not included in the subjects.The result of pilot testing was that all the words were little known by them.Then the following testing could be conducted.
After the tests, SPSS Statistic Software (17.0) was used to compute descriptive statistics of the test scores.Paired sample t-test was carried out to see whether there was a significant difference between two groups of students in the guessing word meaning.
The second word meaning test was to test the word meanings in the contexts.The test includes 20 sentences containing four common words-"print", "head", "high" and "like" and requires the English majors to write down the exact meaning of the word in each sentence.For example, what is the Chinese meaning of the word "high" used in the following five sentences?
1) The building is very high.___________2) He is a high official in the government._________.
3) It was high summer at that moment.____________4) Washington is a man of high character.__________.
5) The beef is a bit high.____________In the sentence 1), the meaning of "high" is "having a top that is some distance above the ground.It is the primary meaning and the English majors may have no difficulty in understanding.However, in sentence 5), the meaning of "high" is "not fresh, spoilt by age".It is the indirect extended meaning and the English majors may have great difficulty in understanding.
After the collection of the data, the data elicited from questionnaires and the test score were input into the computer.Both quantitive and qualitative analysis were adopted in this study.The quantitive analysis was conducted with the help of SPSS 17.0 as in pilot study.For the data elicited from the questionnaire, descriptive analysis was also done first to find out the general tendency of the subjects' positions on the 20 statements, which includes the means and S.D. A detailed qualitative analysis was conducted afterwards to investigate the present situation of vocabulary instruction and word meaning acquisition in English classes and the English majors' self-assessment of their awareness in word meaning acquisition.As to the answers to the open-ended questions intended to get some advice or suggestions from the students on the awareness strengthening and word meaning acquisition, they were grouped and summarized carefully.

Data Analysis and Discussion
According to the statistics of the questionnaire, it can be summarized into the following aspects.As the students do not have much semantic knowledge, it will impede them from understanding some word meaning correctly.Word meaning involves in a complicated connection.
Consequently, it is a heavy task for students to acquire.The contexts vary all the time, so does the word meaning.They lack guidance to learn word meaning by themselves, and moreover, the teachers do not give an accurate and systematic introduction in this respect.Since the students are non-native speakers of English, rote learning has low efficiency.
For the data elicited from the word meaning tests, descriptive analysis was done first to find the general situation of the subjects' answering to the word meaning test items, which means the mean score, Standard deviation (S.D.), the maximum and minimum score of the test papers were presented.Afterwards, the word meaning test items themselves were carefully analyzed and a detailed qualitative analysis was conducted to each test item too.
From Table 1, S.D = 0.50, t = 0.374, P = 0.182 > 0.05, it shows that the two groups of English majors (undergraduates and postgraduates have no significant difference in terms of word primary meaning test (scores in the word meaning test one) under different cues.
From Table 2, S.D. = 0.43, t = −1.19,P = 0.021 < 0.05, it shows that the two groups of English majors (undergraduates and postgraduates have significant difference in terms of word derived meaning. From Table 3, t = −2.132,df = 39, P = 0.039 < 0.05, it shows that the undergraduates of English major have significant difference in terms of word derived test (scores in the word meaning test two).
From Table 4, t = −3.422,df = 39, P = 0.001 < 0.05, it shows that the postgraduates of English majors have significant difference in terms of word derived test (scores in the word meaning test two).
We get the answers to the questions: First, primary meaning cues can enhance word meaning guessing.Primary meaning cues provide adequate indications for the L2 learners to understand the contextual meanings of polysemous words.Second, the English majors at different language proficiency show no statistically significant difference in primary meaning and direct extended meaning.Third, the English majors at different levels have significant difference in terms of indirect extended meaning.

Conclusion
There were a number of potentially important findings from the experiment presented here.This study revealed three associated findings: first, the subjects receiving primary-meaning-cued sentences, in contrast to non-primary meaning-cued sentences, scored significantly higher in inferring the meanings of unfamiliar polysemous words in context.The presence of cues means "bridging information" grammatical and/or semantic, conceptual as well as perceptual.Without adequate bridging information, it would seem next to impossible to infer and recall the contextual meaning of any unfamiliar word.In the present experiment, primary meaning cues provided the subjects with relatively adequate, so that the meanings of the target words could be easily figured out.In contrast, it was difficult for the subjects receiving non-primary meaning cues to unfamiliar polysemous word while the "bridging information" was too abstract.Second, for the primary meaning and direct meaning of common words, all the subjects of different language proficiency have acquired, which means there is no significant hierarchies between the English majors.However, for indirect meaning of a common word, the scores of postgraduate English majors' are higher than undergraduate English majors' which indicates the significant hierarchies between the English majors in the aspect.Although this study was designed carefully, there were still some limitations; conclusions from the present research must be drawn in view of the fact that this study was not free of limitations.
Firstly, although the method of random sampling was used, the present research was not based on a truly random sampling procedure to some extent.The subjects investigated, instead of being completely randomly selected from the English majors, were assumed to be randomly divided in terms of language proficiency.
Secondly, when compared with the large population of ESL learners in China, the 120 participants of English majors in Yangtze University might not present all English learners in China.Conducting the experiment in some more universities and comparing the findings with those, the present study may be a solution to our problem, but it may be a task in terms of scale and complexity.
Thirdly, the words in this experiment are limited to the polysemous words with primary meaning that is concrete and can easily be visualized, which can help students create semantic association and precise elaboration.
Considering the experimental results, the author proposes that the experimental findings should in principle shed some light upon the word meaning teaching and learning, textbooks writers and dictionary compiling.The most important thing is that it can make students become independent and effective learners who can make decisions about how to memorize several meanings of one word and how to choose the meaning from more meanings when they look up the dictionaries.Furthermore, the awareness of polysemous words in the contexts could make students utilize a more flexible method to deal with the words encountered in reading and improve their guessing ability because polysemous words could develop their meanings from the primary meaning.The acquisition of different word meanings is a lifelong education process for all the polysemous words learners.

Table 1 .
Independent sample t-test of undergraduates and postgraduates in word extended meanings.

Table 2 .
Independent sample t-test of undergraduates and postgraduates in word extended meanings.

Table 3 .
Paired sample t-test statistics of two word meaning tests of undergraduates and postgraduates.

Table 4 .
Paired sample t-test statistics of two word meaning tests of postgraduates.