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Looking up the definition of an unknown word when you read a text is an important part of learning. However, like doing every other task, if you have to switch to do another one, then your performance will decrease at both. This is a well known effect of multitasking.

So I suppose that both the performance of looking up the word and the performance of comprehending the text after the resumption will decrease as well, compared to the performance when you do them separately. This seems to be even more true if you can't understand the word in ~3 seconds, i.e. the definition you found is abstruse. Take this definition of the word ostentatious in Merriam – Webster:

marked by or fond of conspicuous or vainglorious and sometimes pretentious display

Now instead of understanding the initial unknown word, you have three more ones: conspicuous, vainglorious, pretentious. This is crazy!

Anyway, is there any evidence to support the above hypothesis?

(Since you don't need to look up for the meanings of the unknown words when you know 98% of the vocabulary of the text used, I guess at this level your vocabulary coverage is below 98%)

References:

Ooker
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  • @Tsundoku thanks for your edit. I just wonder why you don't think putting the FYI bit in small is better? – Ooker Sep 11 '21 at 14:25
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    The small script is less readable and therefore less accessible for people with vision deficiencies. – Tsundoku Sep 11 '21 at 14:58
  • Is this question about expanding vocabulary in one's native language? For second language learning, people often read in their target language and use a bilingual dictionary (such as a browser pop-up dictionary). – Rebecca J. Stones Sep 12 '21 at 01:00
  • @RebeccaJ.Stones I was mostly about L2, but I guess sources for L1 are welcomed as well – Ooker Sep 12 '21 at 13:49
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    We understand words in a context, and this is especially true for your example, 'ostentatious'. If you look for your quoted word in the learner's dictionary equivalent (https://www.learnersdictionary.com/), the word is defined with fewer additional vocabulary words (e.g. I as an L1 English speaker also do not have 'vainglorious' in my passive nor active vocabulary, though I can make a rough guess at its meaning by breaking it down part by part). The Learner's Dictionary also provides examples (contexts) which is the real key to understanding the word and meaning in a sentence. – Brandin Sep 16 '21 at 08:15
  • @Brandin the problem with learning new word via context is that sometimes without understanding the unknown word, you cannot understand the context as well. I wrote a post summarizing some experiments about this. As for looking up dictionaries for learners, I found that sometimes they don't have the word I need – Ooker Sep 16 '21 at 08:36
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    My recommended watching/listening would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU and at about 3:20 mark, Prof Arguelles defines Intenstive Reading and Extensive Reading. Also as he explains on the next slide, there are several factors that can affect your reading comprehension. If you watch the whole video, he also mentions research and specific articles about this topic. I'm not sure if it's summarized anywhere in text, though, so you might have to go through the whole video and make notes about the literature references he mentions there. – Brandin Sep 16 '21 at 13:26
  • @Brandin sorry for the late response. I just watch the first part. While it covers many interesting information, I don't see how it answers the question. Surely even when you are above 98% coverage, there still be cases that you meet an unknown word, which your comprehension depends on it? – Ooker Oct 23 '21 at 07:13
  • @Ooker Yes, I know it's not an answer; I meant that if you wanted to get the references, one option (albeit time consuming) is go through that video and make a note of all of the references that Prof Argulles mentions, i.e. a bibliography. I don't know myself, but it could be that there were actual studies (i.e. real measurements) done in this area. Anecdotally, if I just have to look up a few words, I don't think that's a big deal (98%). I have to do that sometimes reading certain things in my native language, too. Also, in such a case one can often guess at the meaning anyway. – Brandin Oct 24 '21 at 08:26

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