The Effectiveness of LDOCE Definitions for Concrete and Abstract Nouns in Headword- and Picture-Identification Tasks

LDOCE uses a defining vocabulary to make their definitions intelligible to the user. Critics claim this policy may result in imprecise definitions, something especially noticeable in certain concrete and abstract words that are difficult to define by a definition only. This paper examines to what extent LDOCE definitions of such words help learners identify the objects and words being defined. In our experiment on 381 learners of English as a foreign language, three groups of participants viewed different definition types: simplified definitions of LDOCE, unsimplified definitions of MWC, and definitions written in the learners’ mother tongue (UDPL/TR). The results show that the LDOCE definitions proved significantly more useful in the identification tasks than the definitions in MWC, and slightly more useful than in UDPL/TR. Learners with a limited receptive vocabulary size (RVS) did not benefit from LDOCE as much as high-RVS users.