Speaker
Description
This study examines the role of the BLD and the user’s receptive vocabulary knowledge in making appropriate lexical decisions in a sentence completion task. Fifty-two advanced and low-proficiency learners were recruited for the study. They were asked to read a set of gapped sentences and fill in the blanks with semantically similar verbs, using a randomly assigned dictionary (either BLD or MD depending). A logistic mixed-effects regression model was developed in which a participant’s choice of a verb was treated as a success or failure in the task. The model showed that the successful completion of the task significantly depended on the learner’s vocabulary knowledge rather than on the type of dictionary. Likewise, another regression model (two-way ANOVA) revealed that the time taken to complete the task was significantly affected by learners’ vocabulary knowledge but not by dictionary type.
