Dependence of Perception of Vocabulary Difficulty on Contexture

In the collation and scheduling of learning material, it is common to collect feedback from learners about how confident they feel in remembering the items that they just studied. Based on such subjective opinion, the content of future learning tasks is decided such that the items which learners feel confident in remembering are reviewed after a relatively long interval and the ones which they do not feel confident are reviewed sooner. However, it is not clear how reliable is such an opinion or whether it can be biased by posing the inquiry in different modes. In this study, we focus on a learning scenario where non-native English speakers read passages, take a comprehension test and then evaluate a set of related vocabulary regarding their difficulty. We pose and test three hypotheses: (i) Learners' evaluations will be in line with the number of occurrences of the vocabulary (the more frequent the easier), should all options have the same lexical class, (ii) A word with an odd lexical class is likely to stick out, should all options be comparable in the number of occurrences and (iii) The option with the odd lexical class is likely to be ignored, should the remaining options have a clear ranking of the number of occurrences. In order to test our hypotheses, we made experiments with 10 participants. By assuming the independence of all observations, independence of all participants, and independence of all questionnaire items, we depict that the observed behavior has an underlying pattern that supports our claims in a statistically significant way.