Short texts, best-fitting curves and new measures of lexical diversity

Scott Jarvis

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Second Language Acquisition and Learning EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Language Development and Disorders

Abstract

Following up on recent work by Malvern and Richards (1997, this issue; McKee et al., 2000) concerning the measurement of lexical diversity through curve fitting, the present study compares the accuracy of five formulae in terms of their ability to model the type-token curves of written texts produced by learners and native speakers. The most accurate models are then used to consider unresolved issues that have been at the forefront of past research on lexical diversity: the relationship between lexical diversity and age, second language (L2) instruction, L2 proficiency, first language (L1) background, writing quality and vocabulary knowledge. The participants in the study comprise 140 Finnish-speaking and 70 Swedish-speakinglearners of English, and an additional group of 66 native English speakers. The data include written narrative descriptions of a silent film, and the results show that two of the curve-fitting formulae provide accurate models of the type-token curves of over 90% of the texts. The texts for which accurate models were obtained were subjected to further analyses, and the results indicate a clear relationship between lexical diversity and amount of instruction, but a more complicated relationship between lexical diversity and L1 background, writing quality and vocabulary knowledge.

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References

1995Vocabulary Size and Use: Lexical Richness in L2 Written Production 2000Assessing Vocabulary 1988The Role of First Language in Foreign Language Learning 1995The relationship of lexical proficiency to the quality of ESL compositions 1993Word Families 1944The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary.2020Pragmatics and Language Learning 2000Methodological Rigor in the Study of Transfer: Identifying L1 Influence in them Interlanguage Lexicon

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2013Capturing the Diversity in Lexical Diversity 2016The relationship between lexical sophistication and independent and source-based writing 2020Assessing the Validity of Lexical Diversity Indices Using Direct Judgements 2004Creativity and Narrative Task Performance: An Exploratory Study 2020Investigating minimum text lengths for lexical diversity indices 2014Assessing Lexical Proficiency Using Analytic Ratings: A Case for Collocation Accuracy

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