Synopses & Reviews
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 first reviews different methods for quantifying how vocabulary is deployed in spontaneous speech and writing, and then introduces 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.
About the Author
David D. Malvern is Head of the Institute of Education at the University of Reading.
Brian J. Richards is Professor of Education at the University of Reading.
Ngoni Chipere is Lecturer in Language Arts at the University of the West Indies in Barbados.
Pilbliogár Duran is Marketing Consultant at Research Solutions Ltd.
Table of Contents
List of Tables * List of Figures * Acknowledgements * PART I: MEASURING LEXICAL DIVERSITY * Introduction * Some Approaches to Measuring Lexical Diversity * A Mathematical Model of Lexical Diversity * PART II: VALIDATION OF THE MODEL THROUGH ITS APPLICATION TO LANGUAGE CORPORA * Early Child Language 1: The New England Corpus * Early Child Language 2: The Bristol Corpus Lexical Diversity and the Investigation of Accommodation in Foreign Language Proficiency Interviews * A New Measure of Inflectional Diversity and its Application to English and Spanish Date Sets * PART III: DIFFERENT WORD CATEGORIES AND THEIR DIVERSITY: TYPE-TYPE VERSUS TYPE-TOKEN * Comparing the Diversity of Lexical Categories: The Type/Type Ratio and Related Measures * Lexical Diversity and Lexical Sophistication in First Language Writing * PART IV: CONCLUSION * Overview and Conclusions * Notes * Glossary of Technical Terms and Acronyms * Appendices * Index