Lexical Diversity and Language Development: Quantification and Assessment

✍ Scribed by David Malvern, Brian Richards, Ngoni Chipere, Pilar Durán (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 262
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Vocabulary richness, including lexical diversity and use of rare words, has an important role in assessing proficiency, diagnosing progress and testing theory in the study of language development. This book reviews different methods for quantifying how vocabulary is deployed in spontaneous speech and writing, before introducing an alternative approach which can assess overall lexical diversity, measure morphology development and compare the development of different word classes. The new approach is illustrated by its application to first and second language learners.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xvi
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction....Pages 3-15
Traditional Approaches to Measuring Lexical Diversity....Pages 16-30
A Mathematical Model of Lexical Diversity....Pages 31-60
Front Matter....Pages 61-61
Early Child Language 1: the New England Corpus....Pages 63-75
Early Child Language 2: the Bristol Corpus....Pages 76-94
Lexical Diversity and the Investigation of Accommodation in Foreign Language Proficiency Interviews....Pages 95-109
A New Measure of Inflectional Diversity and its Application to English and Spanish Data Sets....Pages 110-117
Front Matter....Pages 119-119
Comparing the Diversity of Lexical Categories: the Type-Type Ratio and Related Measures....Pages 121-151
Lexical Diversity and Lexical Sophistication in First Language Writing....Pages 152-176
Front Matter....Pages 177-177
Overview and Conclusions....Pages 179-184
Back Matter....Pages 185-253

✦ Subjects

Applied Linguistics; Grammar; Language Teaching; Language Education