Concreteness and Language Effects in the Quality of Written Definitions in L1, L2 and L3

Several researchers have suggested that definitional skill explains academic success/failure (Gagné, 2004; Snow, 1987). The words used to investigate definitional skill have all been concrete words given in the first language (L1) and/or the second language (L2) of the participants. This paper reports a study investigating the quality of the definitions of concrete nouns and of abstract nouns in three languages: Arabic (L1), French (L2) and English (L3). Two hundred and thirty students (mean age: 17.1) wrote definitions for five concrete nouns and five abstract nouns in each of their three languages. We examined the concreteness and language effects in the length and quality of definitions. Results showed that while in L1 there was no difference between the length of definitions of concrete nouns and those of abstract nouns, there was a difference in L2 and in L3. As for the definitional quality, there were significant differences between the definitional quality of concrete nouns and of abstract nouns in the three languages.