Abstract The extent to which impartial readers take into account lexical richness and lexical errors when assigning a quality score to compositions written by learners in an intensive English program is discussed in this article. For placement purposes into both ESL programs and academic programs, the writing of these students is often assessed by anonymous readers who base their judgments on timed writing tasks. Much remains to be known, however, about the relationship between language proficiency, specifically lexical proficiency, and reader judgments of the overall quality of timed essays. This study reports on the role of the lexical component as one factor in holistic scoring. Sixty-six placement essays written by students from mixed language backgrounds in the intermediate to advanced range of an intensive English program were holistically scored. These quality scores were then compared to four lexical richness measures: lexical variation, error-free variation, percentage of lexical error, and lexical density. High, significant correlations were found for (a) lexical variation, that is, the ratio of the number of different lexical items to the total number of lexical items in the essay adjusted to length; and (b) lexical variation minus error. The latter measure, error-free variation, correlated best with score.

Various aspects of the vocabulary of near‐native second‐language learners of Swedish were analysed and compared to that of matched native Swedish speakers. Quantitative measures of lexical usage focussed upon comprised lexical density, lexical variation and lexical sophistication. Further, a qualitative and quantitative analysis of lexical errors was carried out.Data were elicited from 36 students attending the second‐year course of the Swedish gymnasieskola (senior high school level). The population comprised 24 bilingual students, among whom 12 had Finnish and 12 had Spanish as their first language, and 12 monolingual Swedish speakers. Both oral and written data were collected from each student, and, from the bilingual students, data were obtained from both their languages. The oral data consisted of retellings of four narratives, while the written data comprised summary reviews of Charlie Chaplin's silent film, Modem Times.Only the Swedish data are considered in this paper. The results are discussed in relation to the current discussion of differing proficiency levels required for everyday context‐embedded, cognitively un‐demand‐ing communication as opposed to literate language use (cf. Cummins, 1983). In addition, the results from the lexical error analysis are related to the concept of fossilisation (Selinker, 1972).

This study addresses the need in discourse psychology for computational techniques that analyze text on multiple levels of cohesion and text difficulty. Discourse psychologists often investigate phenomena related to discourse processing using lengthy texts containing multiple paragraphs, as opposed to single word and sentence stimuli. Characterizing such texts in terms of cohesion and coherence is challenging. Some computational tools are available, but they are either fragmented over different databases or they assess single, specific features of text. Coh-Metrix is a computational linguistic tool that measures text cohesion and text difficulty on a range of word, sentence, paragraph, and discourse dimensions. This study investigated the validity of Coh-Metrix as a measure of cohesion in text using stimuli from published discourse psychology studies as a benchmark. Results showed that Coh-Metrix indexes of cohesion (individually and combined) significantly distinguished the high- versus low-cohesion versions of these texts. The results also showed that commonly used readability indexes (e.g., Flesch incaid) inappropriately distinguished between low- and high-cohesion texts. These results provide a validation of Coh-Metrix, thereby paving the way for its use by researchers in cognitive science, discourse processes, and education, as well as for textbook writers, professionals in instructional design, and instructors.

A well-known problem in the domain of quantitative linguistics and stylistics concerns the evaluation of the lexical richness of texts. Since the most obvious measure of lexical richness, the vocabulary size (the number of different word types), depends heavily on the text length (measured in word tokens), a variety of alternative measures has been proposed which are claimed to be independent of the text length. This paper has a threefold aim. Firstly, we have investigated to what extent these alternative measures are truly textual constants. We have observed that in practice all measures vary substantially and systematically with the text length. We also show that in theory, only three of these measures are truly constant or nearly constant. Secondly, we have studied the extent to which these measures tap into different aspects of lexical structure. We have found that there are two main families of constants, one measuring lexical richness and one measuring lexical repetition. Thirdly, we have considered to what extent these measures can be used to investigate questions of textual similarity between and within authors. We propose to carry out such comparisons by means of the empirical trajectories of texts in the plane spanned by the dimensions of lexical richness and lexical repetition, and we provide a statistical technique for constructing confidence intervals around the empirical trajectories of texts. Our results suggest that the trajectories tap into a considerable amount of authorial structure without, however, guaranteeing that spatial separation implies a difference in authorship.

In the rating scales of major international language tests, as well as in automated evaluation systems (e.g. e-rater), a positive relationship is often claimed between lexical diversity, holistic quality of written or spoken discourses, and language proficiency of candidates. This paper reports a posteriori validation study that analysed a sample of the archived data of an international language test to examine empirically to what extent such relationships exist. It is also noted that previous studies on lexical diversity in the field of applied linguistics have focused exclusively on either written or spoken discourses, no study to date has compared lexical diversity of spoken and written discourses produced by the same participants. Therefore, the second aim of this paper is to understand the differences in lexical diversity between writing and speaking task performances, and to what extent the topics of the writing prompts may affect lexical diversity of written discourses. Using D as a measure of lexical diversity (Malvern and Richards 1997, 2002; Malvern et al. 2004), it was found that D had a statistically significant and positive correlation with the overall quality ratings of both writing and speaking performances as well as the candidates’ general language proficiency. Nevertheless, the significant relationships were not borne out across the sub-groups of the sample in terms of gender, first language background, purpose of taking the test and topics of the writing prompts. The different writing topics also had significant effects on lexical diversity – especially the topics that candidates were highly familiar with – even after controlling for writing ability and overall language proficiency. The lexical diversity of candidates’ writing and speaking performances were approximately at the same level; further, D was found to be a better predictor of speaking than writing performance. The implications of these findings are discussed with specific reference to the use of lexical diversity measures to inform language test validation and the development of lexical diversity parameters in automated evaluation systems.

本文以三个水平组英语学习者的定时作文为语料,利用WordSmith Tools、RANGE和在线削尾处理器等多种手段,调查了作文词汇丰富性的发展模式。词汇丰富性被划分为四个层面,即词汇变化性、词汇密度、词汇复杂性和词汇独特性。多纬度研究表明,在作文长度组间差异很大时,由于长度的影响,词汇变化性没有发展的趋势。在长度恒定时,词汇的变化性有增大的趋势,尤其在最低水平组与其他两组之间差异显著。词汇密度能区分最低水平组和最高水平组,但是测量方法的不同却影响了词汇密度在中间组和最高水平组之间的差异程度。词汇独特性能区分出最高水平组与其他两组,但是在最低水平组和中间组之间却看不出区别。由此得出,词汇独特性、词汇变化性和词汇密度虽能区分非邻近组却不能很好地区分邻近组,因而发展均呈非线性。词汇复杂性最能区分不同组之间词汇使用的差异,即使测量方法有异,其发展路线仍呈直线式。

本文从广度知识和深度知识两个维度入手,分析英语专业一至四年级157名学生在一学期内所写的英语作文,研究其产出性词汇发展过程。结果发现,广度知识与英语水平关系密切,发展过程可分为三个明显不同的阶段;深度知识的发展与英语水平关联紧密,各类词汇知识呈现非同步发展的趋势;广度知识的发展大体与深度知识的增长相伴。本文还建立了二语学习者产出性词汇发展模式。