Lexical Diversity and Language Development

Analysing lexical richness in French learner language: what frequency lists and teacher judgements can tell us about basic and advanced words

“…The question is therefore whether the development of lexical resources in L1 or L2 learning is due to an increase in the number of low frequency words, or whether the children or students make better use of a wider range of higher frequency words. Hayes and Ahrens (1988;in Malvern et al, 2004) and Laufer (1998), found that the percentage of low frequency vocabulary did not increase in the spoken or (free active) written data of their informants. Recently, Horst and Collins (2006) have shown that 11-and 12-year-old francophone learners of English in Québec do not use a higher number of low frequency words after 400 hours of tuition, but a larger variety of high frequency words (up to k1 layer), and they draw less upon cognates (see above).…”

“…We compare different operationalisations of the AG with a well-known measure of lexical diversity, D (Malvern et al, 2004), which represents the single parameter of a mathematical function that models the falling TTR curve (see also Jarvis, 2002 andMcCarthy andJarvis, 2007 for an appraisal of this measure). The different measures can give us an indication to what extent the students from the three groups differ from each other in the quantity and/or in the quality of the vocabulary they use.…”

Examining the transcription-writing link: Effects of handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy on writing performance via planning and translating in middle grades

“…Considerable research points to the construction of syntactically complex and acceptable sentences as a critical aspect of translating (Myhill, 2009a(Myhill, , 2009b. Many linguistic constructions appear to increase in length or complexity with age and ability (Berman & Verhoeven, 2002;Malvern, Richards, Chipere, & Durán, 2004). In addition, sentence-level translating skills seem to influence the quality of written texts (Beers & Nagy, 2009;Berninger, Nagy, & Beers, 2011).…”

Language Dominance and Lexical Diversity: How Bilinguals and L2 Learners Differ in their Knowledge and Use of French Lexical and Functional Items

“…Previous studies have demonstrated that generic measures such as the Index of Guiraud (Guiraud, 1954) and D (Malvern and Richards, 1997;Malvern, Richards, Chipere and Durán, 2004) give a good overall impression of the differences in lexical diversity between texts from different sources, including learner language (see Van Hout and Vermeer, 2007 for an overview and a critical discussion of the different measures).…”