1. generally, the conditions or circumstances in which a particular phenomenon occurs.

2. in linguistics, the parts of a speech or written passage that precede or follow a word, phrase, or other unit and clarify its meaning.

3. in studies of cognition, the environment in which a stimulus event occurs, especially as this influences memory, learning, judgment, or other cognitive processes.

4. in laboratory tasks involving the recognition of stimuli, the setting in which a target stimulus is presented, including any distractors or maskers (see masking). —contextual adj.