Background and Purpose: Correct recognition of hazards in academic labs by using safety signs can prevent injuries in these settings. Although safety signs seem simple, misunderstanding them can put students at risk. Therefore, this research aims to assess the cognitive sign features and guessability of laboratory safety signs for pharmacy students. Materials and Methods: In this study, the comprehensibility of 22 commonly used safety signs was evaluated by 55 pharmacy students aged 20-30 years from Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Two measures of guessability score and cognitive sign features were used to assess the safety signs. The guessability score was measured by a five-choice answering method, where there were correct, partly correct, and wrong answers. Cognitive sign features (familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, meaningfulness, and semantic closeness) rated from 0 to 100. SPSS software, version 23 was applied for data analysis. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, box plots, and the Spearman correlation test. The significance level was set at 0.05. Results: The lowest guessability score was 1.08% for the “general mandatory action sign”, and the highest score was 100% for the “no smoking” sign. Despite the varying responses, two “general mandatory action” and “disconnect before carrying out maintenance or repair” signs had significantly scattered coefficients of variation. According to the overall scores for cognitive sign features, the simplicity criterion had the highest score (85.73%). All cognitive sign features significantly correlated with guessability scores except for concreteness and familiarity. The highest coefficient was reported between guessability score and semantic closeness (r=0.469, P<0.001). Conclusion: The lab safety signs without accompanying text or those that are not frequently encountered are difficult to be perceived correctly by pharmacy students.

This study tested three directional hypotheses: Compared with those receiving cue - inadequate sentences, subjects receiving cue - adequate sentences will 1) Report greater ease in word inference2) Score higher in inferring and remembering the contextual meaning of unfamiliar words3) The higher the score of word inference, the better the retention of the contextual meanings of the target words.With statistical significance, all these hypotheses were confirmed. An approach combining schema theory and the generative model of comprehension was used for the rational of this study and the discussion of its findings. Since adequate cues in context can relieve learners of English as a Foreign Language from the anxiety of unfamiliar words, it might follow that reasonably sufficient contextual cues should be provided in texts for foreign language learns, so that enough information can be created for them to play "psycholinguistic guessing game"  (Goodman 1967)- if it is part of the interactional goal.Moreover, since adequate contextual cues can enhance inferring and remembering the meanings of unfamiliar words in context, it might follow that "more comprehensible input" (Krashen 1985) should be involved in acquiring vocab.means to provide more accessible frames of relevant reference according to schema theory, or, according to – receiver. To make the verbal input in the text more comprehensible, both linguistic input (i.e. the message conveyed in the language in the text), and extra linguistic input should be available, or familiar, to the text receiver. This being the case, the learner can better acquire what is known by employing what is given, known or acquired.