First-year students in an English course at the University of British Columbia were asked to define 53 non-technical words from Munn's introductory psychology text. In spite of generous scoring standards performance, over-all, was alarmingly poor. Half of the students could correctly identify no more than 29 of the 53 words, and such common words as “incidental” and “spontaneously” were missed by over 50% of our 57 subjects. Results are comparable to Hoffman's findings which were reported in this Journal 18 years ago.
