A study examined language learners' ability to integrate information from sentence contexts and semantic decomposition in interpreting novel kanji compounds (i.e., words consisting of two or more Japanese characters). Subjects, 59 English-speaking college students learning Japanese, inferred the meanings of 72 unknown compounds consisting of familiar kanji characters under 3 conditions. Overall, students were more likely to obtain correct answers when they had kanji compounds within sentence contexts than when they received either compounds in isolation or sentences with target words blanked out. Further analysis, however, indicated considerable individual differences among students in the information to which they pay attention. In addition, inferring word meanings from context required a different ability from the ability to use information from word elements. Findings suggest that (1) learning word meanings from multiple information sources is more advantageous than learning from a single source; (2) contextual information and information from word components are qualitatively different; and (3) language learners show individual differences in their choice of information when multiple sources are available. (Contains 38 references, 3 notes, and 8 tables of data.) (Author/RS)