Processing Unfamiliar Words: Strategies, Knowledge Sources, and the Relationship to Text and Word Comprehension. The Canadian

This study examines strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, paralinguistics, etc.) that second language learners of English use to process unfamiliar words in listening comprehension and whether the use of strategies or knowledge sources relates to successful text comprehension or word comprehension. Data were collected using the procedures of immediate retrospection without recall support and of stimulated recall. Twenty participants with Chinese as their first language participated in the procedures. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were made. The results indicate that inferencing is the primary strategy that learners use to process unfamiliar words in listening and that it relates to successful text comprehension. Among the different knowledge sources that learners use, the most frequently used knowledge sources are semantic knowledge of words in the local co-text combined with background knowledge and semantic knowledge of the overall co-text. The finding that the use of most knowledge sources does not relate to the comprehension of the word suggests that no particular knowledge source is universally effective or ineffective and that what is crucial is to use the various knowledg