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ChatGPT and similar generative AI models are increasingly being integrated into educational practice, including second language (L2) writing. However, AI-generated writing may significantly differ from that of developing L2 writers, raising potential issues over academic integrity. With AI detectors still underused in many contexts due to accuracy concerns, it is essential to determine if and how AI-generated texts are similar or different to those of L2 writers. This study compares lexical and collocation choices between essays on the same topic generated by ChatGPT (version 3.5) and human L2 writers using corpus analytic techniques. R statistical software was used for analysis and comparison. Results suggest that when tasked with producing academic essays under the same topic, ChatGPT-3.5 excels in generating texts with formal and complex vocabulary suited for academic and technical themes, while human L2 writers tend to focus on personal and social issues, using more varied and context-rich vocabulary. Accordingly, educators seeking to detect AI use should recognise the distinct linguistic and cultural experiences L2 writers bring to their writing, while students using AI need to understand the nature of the machine-like clarity and directness of expression as produced by ChatGPT as compared with their own typical production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to test the possible impact of the form information in presented (reading vs. listening situation) on the comprehension of narrative texts in students with ADHD comorbid with dyslexia. An experimental group with a mean age of 8.5 years and a control group with a mean age of 8.9 years participated. Three measures were used to analyse comprehension: lexical diversity, cohesive resources and episodic structure. The results showed no significant differences in the control group on all the measures under study, but there were significant differences in some measures in the experimental group, so that the use of cohesive resources and lexical diversity were favoured by the reading situation. Measures of episodic structure were not significantly affected by presentation modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but the problem remains. This methodological review provides a critical analysis not only of the most commonly used indices in language learning studies, but also of the length problem itself, as well as of the methodology for evaluating the proposed solutions. Analysis of three data sets of texts produced by English language learners revealed that indices that reduce all texts to the same length using a probabilistic or an algorithmic approach solve the length‐dependency problem; however, all these indices failed to address the second problem, which is their sensitivity to the parameter that determines the length to which the texts are reduced. The paper concludes with recommendations for optimizing lexical diversity analysis. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the feasibility of cross-linguistic authorship attribution and the author's gender identification using Machine Translation (MT). Computational stylistics experiments were conducted on a Greek blog corpus translated into English using Google's Neural MT. A Random Forest algorithm was employed for authorship and gender profiling, using different feature groups [Author's Multilevel N-gram Profiles, quantitative linguistics (QL), and cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE)] in both original and translated texts. Results indicate that MT is a viable method for converting a multilingual corpus into one language for authorship attribution and gender profiling research, with considerable accuracy when training and testing datasets use identical language. In the pure cross-linguistic scenario, higher accuracies than the baselines were obtained using CLWE and QL features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse abnormalities are a prominent feature in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, including poor lexical diversity, and have been found to differentiate patients from healthy subjects. However, discourse processing in individuals with high schizotypal personality traits is less understood and is often overshadowed by research on clinical psychotic symptoms. In the present study, we examined schizotypal traits at a non-clinical threshold and their association with lexical diversity and discourse coherence using two automated Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools - Type-Token-Ratio (TTR) measures from the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Diversity (TAALED) and discourse coherence using sentence-level average cosign similarity with FastText to assess sentence similarity. 276 college students completed the full assessment including the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire- Brief Revised (SPQ-BR) and recorded a speech sample describing a detailed painting. Results revealed that high schizotypal traits, specifically positive traits, were associated with lower lexical diversity and higher sentence similarity. Our findings suggest that even when clinically significant symptoms are not present, discourse abnormalities are present in healthy populations with high ST. The stronger association with positive traits suggests that theories of perseveration and top-down processing may warrant further investigation in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child-directed print corpora enable systematic psycholinguistic investigations, but this research infrastructure is not available in many understudied languages. Moreover, researchers of understudied languages are dependent on manual tagging because precise automatized parsers are not yet available. One plausible way forward is to limit the intensive work to a small-sized corpus. However, with little systematic enquiry about approaches to corpus construction, it is unclear how robust a small corpus can be made. The current study examines the potential of a non-sequential sampling protocol for small corpus development (NSP-SCD) through a cross-corpora and within-corpus analysis. A corpus comprising 17,584 words was developed by applying the protocol to a larger corpus of 150,595 words from children's books for 3-to-10-year-olds. While the larger corpus will by definition have more instances of unique words and unique orthographic units, still, the selectively sampled small corpus approximated the larger corpus for lexical and orthographic diversity and was equivalent for orthographic representation and word length. Psycholinguistic complexity increased by book level and varied by parts of speech. Finally, in a robustness check of lexical diversity, the non-sequentially sampled small corpus was more efficient compared to a same-sized corpus constructed by simply using all sentences from a few books (402 books vs. seven books). If a small corpus must be used then non-sequential sampling from books stratified by book level makes the corpus statistics better approximate what is found in larger corpora. Overall, the protocol shows promise as a tool to advance the science of child language acquisition in understudied languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful spoken discourse requires a speaker to be informative to deliver a coherent, meaningful message. The informativeness of discourse can be conveyed by the variety of vocabulary produced (i.e., lexical diversity [LD]), the typicality of vocabulary items used (i.e., core lexicon [CL]), and the amount of relevant content produced (i.e., information units). Yet, it is well documented that older adults produce less informative content compared to younger adults despite relatively subtle changes to LD. The typicality of core lexical items has not been assessed in healthy aging. Paradoxically, these results indicate that some aspects of discourse informativeness remain stable or even improve across the adult lifespan, while other aspects decline. The purpose of the current study is to understand how microlinguistic processes of informativeness change across the adult lifespan. The cross‐sectional study included narrative language samples from two wordless picture books collected from 420 healthy participants between 20 and 89 years old. LD and percent of correct information units (%CIUs) were analyzed, as well as CL nouns and verbs. The results indicate that %CIUs and CL nouns demonstrate a quadratic decline starting around the ages of 40 and 60, respectively. LD shows a slight linear decline as a function of age. CL verbs are resistant to age‐related changes but are influenced greater by education. The differing findings across the microlinguistic measures can be explained by the weakened connections within the language system and the differential characteristics of the measures. The findings contribute to the aging literature by systematically identifying the trajectory of how variables of informativeness change with age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical complexity has been a key consideration of teaching preparation in determining grade appropriateness of teaching materials. However, the lack of quantified and defined standards for benchmarking lexical complexity has made it difficult for teachers when adapting source texts to target learners. This study has assessed quantitative differences in lexical complexity of exemplar texts at different points of schooling using a range of lexical diversity and sophistication features. The data consists of 2,372 texts from popular curriculum packages adopted from 1 to 12 grades of the English curriculum in China. One-way ANOVAs revealed significant differences in 16 out of 17 lexical complexity indices among different grades. Subsequent post hoc tests identified three lexical diversity features and four sophistication features that helped to differentiate exemplar texts across these 12 grades. These findings on the nature and role of lexical complexity have yielded new insights into the establishment of grade-level benchmarks for material preparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children's later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine linguistic and interactive features of the speech addressed to Argentinean toddlers (mean age 19.9 month) living under different socioeconomic circumstances. We focused on the lexical diversity (VOCD) and syntactic complexity (MLU) that characterize utterances that fulfil different pragmatic functions (comments, requests for verbal and non-verbal response) addressed to children living under vulnerated and non-vulnerated socioeconomic circumstances. Results showed differences regarding lexical diversity between groups of households for requests for non-verbal response, while regarding syntactic complexity differences between groups were found in both requests for non-verbal response and for verbal response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For proper assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders in Mandarin children, it is important to have measures that closely track the course of normal development. The current study uses a large collection of spontaneous conversational language samples to track the developmental course of five language measures: mean length of utterance (MLU), the MLU of the five longest utterances (MLU5), vocD, number of repetitions, and number of retracings. We used cross-validation-based linear regression to estimate the relationship between age, gender and each of the five variables derived from the conversational language samples in 101 typically developing Mandarin-speaking children aged 3 to 7. Each of the five measures showed significant age-related effects during the period from age 3 to age 7. As norm-referenced measures of language development in children speaking Mandarin, these developmental data could inform clinical therapists regarding assessments and interventions for children with language disorder or impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an established research agenda on dissecting an article's components and their association with a journal's prestige. However, journals' titles and their overview, aim and scope (i.e. journal's mission statement – JMS(s)) have not been investigated with the same diligence. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive outlook of titles and JMSs' lexical structure and identify significant differences between journals prestige and type of access and their JMS content in the field of business, management and accounting (BMA), considering the field's experience in developing and applying mission statements. Titles and JMSs' structural analysis reflected current and critical discussion in BMA: a predilection for counterintuitive findings and information and communication technology (ICT) tools. JMSs expressed primarily target customers and markets. JMSs from reputable journals showed a higher betweenness for key-terms related to rigorous features. In contrast, JMSs of lower reputable journals highlighted indexing attributes. The Wilcoxon rank-sum and the Kruskal–Wallis tests showed significant differences in the JMSs' median diversity regarding the journal's type of access and best quartiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Straightforward linguistic measures may be indicators of reduced language production and lexical diversity among individuals with schizophrenia with negative symptoms and neurocognitive impairments. We compared 98 patients with schizophrenia to 101 unaffected controls on six language variables (e.g. , number of relationships between objects, use of complex transitions in the narrative structure), number of words produced, and lexical diversity computed as the moving average type-token ratio from both speaking and writing tasks. Patients differed from controls on nearly all of the linguistic measures; number of words produced had the strongest effect, with an average Cohen's d of 0.68; values pertaining to lexical diversity were 0.50 and 0.32, respectively, for the speaking tasks and the writing tasks. Most measures were correlated with alogia and other domains of negative symptoms (including avolition-apathy and anhedonia-asociality), as well as with diverse neurocognitive domains, especially those pertaining to working memory, verbal learning, and verbal category fluency. Further work is needed to understand longitudinal changes in these linguistic variables, as well as their utility as measures of alogia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of artificial intelligence tools has seen an enormous growth recently. Linguistic artificial intelligence tools are being successfully applied in the field of speech analysis and discourse. In our study, we used automatic NLP tools to detect differences in picture description in the discourse of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and healthy people. A measure of lexical diversity was used to compare discourse complexity. Transcripts of recordings of the probands within the EWA project were used in the study. From the multiple comparisons, we found that there is a statistically significant difference between healthy people and people suffering from MCI and AD. Our results indicate that healthy people have more lexical diversity than people suffering from MCI and AD – a more diverse vocabulary in spontaneous speech, in our case, when describing a picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the relationship between creativity and the linguistic quality of the output in L2 written argumentative and narrative essays produced by 95 Hungarian secondary school students at intermediate to advanced level of proficiency. Participants also completed a figural creativity test which was standardized and validated for the target sample. The creativity test assessed creative fluency and elaboration, the abstractness of title and resistance to premature closure of the figurative representations. The lexical sophistication and diversity, syntactic complexity and elaboration, and cohesion and coherence of the students' writing was analyzed with automated natural language processing tools. The interrelationship of creativity and the linguistic features of the argumentative and narrative texts was examined using correlational analyses. The results reveal a complex interplay of the role of different facets of creativity in L2 written task performance that varies across the two types of tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides further insight into the Reaction Object Construction (she nodded intelligence) as a case of constructional contamination, a phenomenon that describes the relation between two or more constructions such that usage frequencies of one construction influence the patterns of variation in another one (Pijpops and Van de Velde 2016). Earlier research has shown that the frequencies of structures of the type she gave a nod of intelligence explain part of the lexical diversity that is found in the object slot of the nineteenth-century British ROC. These findings are now contrasted with American data to explore whether the phenomenon has gone beyond British English and, if so, examine how this is manifested in diachrony. The results show clear similarities with the British data, confirming that horizontal interaction in the network of the Late Modern English ROC played a role in the diverse configuration of this construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News spreads most widely on social media; however, these platforms can also disseminate fake news, especially in times of crisis, leading to serious societal consequences. To understand why people share fake news on social media, we examine information-seeking behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms are using third parties to verify news articles due to the abundance of fake news, which is increasingly time- and resource-intensive. In response, we propose a news representation model that leverages information-seeking patterns to extract syntactic, emotional, lexical diversity, and readability features from social media posts for accurate fake news detection. We demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves detection performance over traditional language representation models, validated using three social media datasets from the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that incorporating information search behavior and linguistic features effectively enhances the detection of fake news on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This mixed-methods study aims to investigate the impact of traditional and digital storytelling (DST) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing performance in terms of complexity, accuracy, lexical diversity, and fluency (CALF) measures. Moreover, the study sheds light on how learners were engaged along behavioral, cognitive, affective, and agentive dimensions when completing the DST task. The participants were 45 intermediate-level college students who were assigned to the DST and traditional storytelling (TST) groups. Under a four-week curriculum, the participants constructed their stories by using either an online platform or traditional pen-and-paper format. Adopting a quasi-experiment design, within-group and between-group comparisons were made. A series of paired samples t -tests were run to compare the pretest and post-test of each group (within-group comparison) and assessed any improvement from the pretest to the post-test across CALF measures. Also, a 2 × 2 mixed-methods analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run on the post-test scores of the two groups across CALF measures (between-group comparisons). The results of these tests unveiled that the storytelling task, in either traditional or digital mode, effectively enhanced students' overall writing performance. However, there was a significant impact of DST on syntactic complexity, accuracy, and lexical diversity, while writing fluency remained unaffected. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire and interview data revealed the students' multidimensional engagement (behavioral, cognitive, affective, and agentive) while performing the DST task, with the agentive aspect emerging as most prominent. Pedagogical implications of incorporating DST in EFL contexts were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have analysed the linguistic and interactive characteristics of child-directed speech (HDN) as they can influence children's linguistic development (HOFF-GINSBERG, 1986). However, very few studies have addressed the relationship between these properties of HDN, different theorists are starting to emphasize the importance of approaching the study of linguistic input in a multidimensional way (ROWE; SNOW, 2020). In order to address this gap in the literature, this work analyzes the relationship between the interactive properties and the linguistic properties of child-directed speech. To this end, the lexical diversity and syntactic complexity of sentences with different pragmatic functions in speech addressed to 40 children living in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires are studied. Results showed that comments presented greater syntactic complexity and greater lexical diversity than action requests and verbal response requests. Requests for action were characterized by a more diverse vocabulary than requests for verbal response. The effect measures of the variance's analysis show that the pragmatic function of the utterances explains a higher percentage of the variance for lexical diversity than for syntactic complexity of the utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although differentiating between fluency, accuracy and complexity, while assessing L2 task performance, is becoming a standard practice, lexical complexity as a distinctive area has received less attention in the task-based language teaching (TBLT) literature. This study re-examines previous frameworks of lexical complexity and investigates three lexical dimensions, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication and lexical density, using a structured 2 × 2 × 2 split-plot experimental design. The participants were divided into a non-planning group and a planning group and each group was further dichotomised into two proficiency levels. Each participant was assigned one familiar and one unfamiliar oral narrative task. The results show that one's prior knowledge about a subject is associated with higher lexical diversity and sophistication, while pre-task planning promotes lexical density. The effects of proficiency seem to be largely overridden by the effects of prior knowledge and pre-task planning and show little impact on overall lexical performance. Interestingly, lexical diversity and lexical sophistication are independent of each other, and lexical density is moderately correlated with both lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. The results are discussed with reference to the Levelt model of speech production with some pedagogical implications on content-based language instruction. The exploration of the relationships between the lexical measures reveals a need for deeper and subtler characterisation of L2 lexical complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, many second/foreign language (L2) academic writing instruction programs place a high premium on pre-writing strategies. The current study examined the effect of software-supported concept mapping on lexical diversity (LD) of English learners' argumentative essays within a process writing framework. Additionally, the relationship between the learners' LD and their overall writing quality was investigated. To this end, 53 university English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduates were assigned to a computer-aided concept mapping (CACM) and a traditional outlining condition over a span of seven weeks. The CACM group was instructed through the graphic organizer software Inspiration®, whereas the comparison group underwent outlining instruction for planning their writing tasks. Measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD) was used to assess the so-called D values of the assignments. The results revealed that the CACM group outperformed the outlining group in terms of LD scores. Also, no relationship was found between LD and overall quality of the essays. The findings provide L2 researchers and teachers with insights into understanding the use of CACM strategy in process writing. Moreover, exploiting MTLD afforded our experiment the opportunity to counteract potential pitfalls associated with text size. Further implications for the L2 teacher are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Aims: The number of different words (NDW), an essential measure of lexical diversity, is extremely valuable towards providing data regarding children's language development. However, in Cyprus, practitioners are deprived of the opportunity to utilize NDW, as no normative data exist for toddlers who speak Cypriot Greek (CYG). Methods: The language samples of 36 monolingual CYG-speaking toddlers (aged 36, 40, 44, and 48 months) with a typical course of language development were collected and quantitatively analyzed. Based on the language sample analysis, we ascertained typical NDW values at the aforementioned ages and tested through a linear mixed-effects model whether gender and age affected NDW. Results: The results showed that age significantly predicted NDW increase; gender did not emerge as a significant predictor of NDW, but this may be due to the small statistical power. Conclusion: This study intends to provide the first step towards longitudinal investigation of the level of NDW for CYG-speaking children with a typical course of language development. The provided data, which could serve as preliminary norms, may be used – under some restrictions for the time being – during language assessment. Moreover, these acquired data could contribute to the development of an NDW database for diverse CYG-speaking populations of different age ranges in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is devoted to identify the specifics of lexical component of texts in the Internet discourse and study the general pattern in creating an English-language blog. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that lexical features and their functions are comprehensively studied in the popularized sphere of the Internet. The purpose is to analyze and compare the lexical characteristics of English texts, identify their interconnection and significance in the design of the blog, as well as, applying to concrete examples, by using a consistent analysis algorithm based on material of the British site British Library Blogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within higher education, it is often believed that the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) will provide domestic students with the language skills that will enable them to be more competitive in their future professional pursuits. However, research into language learning and EMI at the university level is very scarce. This study examined essays by 195 undergraduate students (99 1st-year and 96 3rd-year learners) at a major university in Spain in order to investigate the effect of three years of instruction through the medium of English on their level of proficiency, essay quality and lexical diversity (as measured by the Oxford Placement test, the CEFR writing scale and three measures of lexical diversity). The results showed a significant improvement in the learners' second language (L2) proficiency and a significant but subtle increase in essay quality ratings but no significant increase in lexical diversity scores. In the same vein as the findings of some of the other studies we discuss, the present findings seem to suggest the need to rethink and re-evaluate the implementation of EMI in contexts like the one examined in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to explore both native and non-native French speakers' spoken output in two dialogic speaking tasks. More specifically, the aim of this study was threefold. First, the researchers focused on the relationship between L2 learners' receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge and their vocabulary use in two dialogic speaking tasks. Second, the study set out to compare L2 speakers' vocabulary use (i.e., number of words produced, lexical frequency profile, and lexical diversity as measured by D and HD-D) with L1 speakers' vocabulary use in the same speaking tasks. Third, the researchers wanted to determine which of the aforementioned vocabulary measures could predict experts' holistic ratings of lexical proficiency. Fifty 17-year-old L2 learners took a receptive and a productive vocabulary test and performed two dialogic speaking tasks, and 27 French L1 speakers performed the same two dialogic speaking tasks. The results indicate that there is a positive, moderate correlation between receptive vocabulary knowledge and holistic ratings but not between productive vocabulary knowledge and the holistic rating scores. Moreover, L1 speakers produce more tokens, types, and lemmas and fewer high-frequency words when they speak. The lexical diversity of their output is also higher than that of L2 speakers. Finally, it seems that lexical diversity (i.e., HD-D), combined with the number of types that speakers use and the frequency of those words, explains a large part of the variance in holistic rating scores. The findings of the present study shed more light on the role of L1 and L2 speakers' vocabulary use in spoken output for another language than English (i.e., French) and for another population than university students (i.e., low-intermediate learners). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although early life experiences of language and parenting are critical for children's development, large home observation studies of both domains are scarce in the psychological literature, presumably because of their considerable costs to the participants and researchers. Here, we used digital audio-recorders to unobtrusively observe 107 children, aged 2.03 to 3.99 years (M = 2.77, SD = 0.55), and their families over 3 days (M = 15.06 hr per day, SD = 1.87). The recording software estimated the total number of words that a child heard over the course of a day. In addition, we transcribed six 5-min excerpts per family (i.e., 30 min overall) to extract estimates of children's and their parents' lexical diversity, positive and critical parenting, and children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors. We found that home language input (i.e., number of words and lexical diversity) was positively associated with children's cognitive ability and lexical diversity but not with their behaviors. In addition, we observed that home language input varied as much within as between families across days (intraclass correlation = .47). By comparison, parenting predicted children's behavioral outcomes but was not related to their cognitive or lexical ability. Overall, our findings suggest that home language input affects child development in cognition and language, while positive and parenting informs their behavioral development. Furthermore, we demonstrated that digital audio-recordings are useful tools for home observa- tion studies that seek to disentangle the complex relationships between early life home environments and child development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to quantitatively describe the lexical richness in informative news articles written by journalism students through indicators of lexical diversity and lexical density. A comparative analysis of a corpus of news articles written by two groups of undergraduate students (first and fourth year) and a group of graduate journalists was performed. In order to compare the corpora, measures of lexical density and diversity were used while statistical tests were applied to analyze differences between the groups. Though results show differences, it is density the indicator where statistically significant differences were found. This would indicate that despite students having a command of a wide and varied lexis, the informative level and communicative capacity of their texts are insufficient compared to the requirements at a professional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the extent to which young heritage speakers' oral narratives in their first language (L1) differ from monolinguals' narratives with regard to lexical richness (lexical diversity and lexical sophistication). It also explores which demographic factors (age, age at emigration and length of emigration) and/or socio-linguistic factors (frequency of heritage language use and parental attitudes toward heritage language maintenance) account for the differences. Data and analysis: The participants were a group of 25 young speakers of Persian as a heritage language, who were either born in or emigrated to New Zealand, and a group of 25 monolingual counterparts in Iran. Demographic information about the heritage speakers as well as information about parental attitude and practices regarding heritage language acquisition and maintenance were collected through semi-structured interviews with their parents. A film-retelling task was used to elicit the oral narratives, and these were analyzed for lexical diversity (by means of the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity) and for lexical sophistication (by counting the incidence of low-frequency words). Findings and conclusion: As expected, the monolinguals' narratives tended to manifest greater lexical richness than the heritage speakers', especially according to the measure of lexical sophistication. Against expectation, frequency of heritage language use and parental attitude toward heritage language acquisition and maintenance were not found to be significant predictors of the young heritage speakers' results. For the heritage speakers who were born in New Zealand, the results were predicted best by their age, while for those who arrived in New Zealand at a later age, the best predictors were both their age and how old they were at the time of emigration. This suggests that the demographic factors overrode the potential influence of the socio-linguistic variables examined. Originality: This study sheds light on (factors that contribute to) young heritage speakers' L1 lexical competence, a topic that has hitherto been under-investigated. Significance and implications: A major implication of this study is showing the association of age and heritage speakers' lexical richness. Although the statistical analyses did not show the effect of socio-linguistic variables, this finding indirectly supports the effect of parental input on heritage language proficiency in young bilinguals. Limitations: Limitations of the study include the relatively small number of participants, the use of only one task to elicit speech samples and the reliance on parents' self-reported family language habits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequent engagement in English extramural activities (i.e., activities that take place outside the classroom) has been found to have a positive impact on EFL learners' vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. In the present study, we aim to extend our knowledge of the possible impact of extramural activities into the realm of second-language writing. Specifically, we investigate the relationship among a number of English extramural activities and two aspects of writing development: lexical diversity and noun phrase complexity. The data are drawn from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC) which includes texts produced by Swedish secondary school students. The corpus also includes information on how many hours per week students (i) engage in conversations in English, (ii) communicate in English while playing computer/video games, (iii) read in English, (iv) spend time on social media with English content, (v) and watch TV shows or movies in English. The results show that reading in English leads to higher frequency of adjectival modification, whereas conversing in English and watching TV programs positively impact lexical diversity. The results of the study have implications for discussions about the role of L2 classroom instruction vis-à-vis learners' extramural activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept drunk, for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, and hammered. For the concept sober, however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like sober or abstinent. While earlier variation studies have revealed that meaning-related concept characteristics correlate with the amount of lexical variation, these studies were limited in scope, being restricted to one semantic field and to one dialect area, that of the Limburgish dialects of Dutch. In this paper, we investigate whether the impact of concept characteristics, viz. vagueness, lack of salience and proneness to affect, is manifest in a similar way in other dialects and other semantic fields. In particular, by extending the scope of the earlier studies to other carefully selected semantic fields, we investigate the generalizability of the impact of concept characteristics to the lexicon as a whole. The quantitative approach that we employ to measure concept characteristics and lexical diversity methodologically advances the study of linguistic variation. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the further development of Cognitive Sociolinguistics by showcasing how meaning can be a source of lexical diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores certain properties, like the quantity, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity of the speech of teachers and children in different classrooms situations in early childhood education. Specifically, it analyzes whether those properties configure differentiated language patterns according to the ongoing classroom activity. Forty seven interactions between medium-low and low socioeconomic status children and their teachers in public educational institutions of the Province of Entre Ríos, Argentina, were analyzed. A multivariate analysis that gathers techniques of factor analysis and classification was carried out. The results configured three classes: composed mostly of story-reading situations, with long turns by the teacher and syntactic complexity in the children; composed of corner play situations, where both the teacher and the children displayed a greater volume of speech; and constituted mainly by round situations, with an overall lower speech volume than the other two classes. With the exception of lexical diversity, the linguistic properties considered contributed to explain the particular configurations of the interchanges in the story reading, corner play and round situations. The results are discussed in light of the literature and the educational implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Typically developing children had higher D , MTLD, and MATTR than children with language delay. • 4-year-olds produced significantly higher D and MTLD than the 3-year-olds. • D and MTLD showed strong sensitivity in assessing Mandarin-speaking children. Abstract Purpose The purpose of this study is to evaluate the applicability of D , the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD), and Moving ¬Average Type ¬Token Ratio (MATTR) for measuring lexical diversity of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. This study examined if D , MTLD, and MATTR can be used to differentiate two different age groups (children age 3 and 4 years) and two language ability groups (typically developing children and children with language delay). Method Seventy-eight Mandarin-speaking typically developing children and 56 Mandarin-speaking children with language delay participated in this study. The researchers collected, transcribed, and analyzed language samples from these children. Results The findings showed that D and MTLD were sensitive LD measures for assessing the Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. D and MTLD differentiated the two different age groups and language ability groups. The D and MTLD scores of typically developing children were significantly higher than those of children with language delay. Also, 4-year-olds had significantly higher D and MTLD scores than 3-year-olds. MATTR differentiated the two language ability groups but not the two age groups. Possible factors influencing the sensitivity of lexical diversity measures were discussed. Conclusions The findings indicated that D and MTLD were sensitive for assessing Mandarin-speaking preschoolers from Taiwan. MATTR can be used to identify children with language delay in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • It is possible to explore the influence of lexical features on teacher judgements. • MTLD, D and word range are suitable measures to manipulate a learner's vocabulary. • Lexical features influence teacher judgements of grammar and frame of essay. • This study introduces a helpful tool to practice writing assessment in teacher education. Abstract Numerous studies have examined the relationship between lexical features of students' compositions and judgements of text quality. However, the degree to which teachers' judgements are influenced by the quality of vocabulary in students' essays with regard to their assessment of other textual characteristics is relatively unexplored. This experimental study investigates the influence of lexical features on teachers' judgements of English as a second language (ESL) argumentative essays. Using analytic and holistic rating scales, English pre-service teachers (N = 37) in Switzerland assessed four essays of different proficiency levels in which the levels of lexical diversity and sophistication had been experimentally varied. Coh-Metrix software was used to manipulate the level of lexical diversity, as measured by MTLD and D, and the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES) software was used to obtain differing levels of lexical sophistication, as measured by word range. The results suggested that texts with greater lexical diversity and sophistication were assessed more positively concerning their overall quality as well as the analytic criteria 'grammar' and 'frame of essay'. The implications of this study for classroom practice and teacher education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the effects of topic on lexical diversity and lexical sophistication in Korean university students’ English writing with and without text length control. Topic effect was initially examined under two sets of writing contexts: the same topic and different topics and later again under the same condition with the only difference being in text length (shortened into 200-word writing). Lexical diversity and lexical sophistication were measured using VocabProfile that produces type-token ratio (TTR) and lexical frequency profile (LFP). Lexical diversity was measured by TTR, and lexical sophistication was measured by academic word list (AWL) and off the list words (OLW) from the four lexical frequency lists generated by VocabProfile. Statistical analysis revealed that topic had a large impact on lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. Also, text length effect was not pronounced in this traditional TTR and LFP analysis. Rather, the number of word types (i.e., the number of different words) appeared as a more influential factor to determine TTR and LFP values. This finding indicates that topic plays an important role in EFL writing. Further study is needed to confirm these study results using other lexical analysis programs. Findings and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language accommodation in online dating profiles: Effects of education level and type of dating site on language use This study investigates whether online dating profile owners accommodate their language use based on the type of dating site used. Following Communication Accommodation Theory, we expect that highly educated online daters’ language use on a dating site designed explicitly for the highly educated is different from language use of highly educated people on a general dating site with users of both low and high education levels. Specifically, highly educated dating site users will accommodate their language use depending on the dating site they use. Based on an analysis of 1570 profile texts from two Dutch dating sites, we found that profiles of highly educated users on a general dating site differed from those written by highly educated daters on the high-education dating site on some but not all measures of lexical complexity and on the amount of language errors made. On the high-education dating site, the highly educated daters used some more linguistic elements that are associated with a high education level than those on the general site. This suggests that minor contextual differences in expected audience can already induce linguistic accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of current lexical richness indices are based on Indo-European languages, especially English, with a lack of research that investigates their applicability to diverse language types. This study examines the applicability of 44 lexical richness indices, based on Indo-European languages, to Chinese, with a specific emphasis on investigating their predictive power for the writing quality of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners. The present study reveals that five indices (Number of Different Words, Uber Index, Corrected Verb Variation1, Lexical Frequency Profile, and Verb Sophistication1) assessing English as a second language (L2) can also effectively predict the writing quality of CFL learners, and six indices (Verb Variation, Verb Variation1, Function Words Ratio_ auxiliary, Function Words Ratio_ pronoun, Lexical Density1, and Lexical Density2) may be more suitable for measuring Chinese, but not English. Moreover, transformed indices demonstrate a better capacity to measure L2 Chinese compared to traditional indices. In conducting a preliminary exploration of effective indices for measuring the lexical richness of Chinese interlanguage, this study emphasizes their potential impact on L2 teaching and suggests directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical Diversity (LDi) and Lexical Density (LDe) may characterize texts belonging to a certain genre, relating them to its lexical richness and to the amount of information it contains. This study aims to analyze the presence of these two aspects in texts produced by Portuguese 7-year-old students in the same classroom (2nd year), comparing individually written texts and dyad ones. From eight proposals of textual production in which the teacher asked 12 students to invent stories, we constituted a corpus including 24 individual productions and 36 dyadic productions. The unit of measure adopted for LDi was TTR. We calculated the LDe by dividing the total number of lexical items by the total number of words in each text produced. Our results show that the LDe between individual and dyadic texts is stable, with no significant variation among them. However, for LDi, these texts show a greater variation, and an inversely proportional relationship. Comparing the individual productions, we found a tendency to LDe increase, especially in those productions which had a low score in the 1st proposal. Regarding the amount of words per text, there was an increase between the two texts of the same students. In spite of the fact that this suggests that the students started to write longer texts, the decreasing tendency of LDi remained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children’s data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formulaic competence, the native-like use of ready-made sequences of words, is a key aspect in the development of L2 writing proficiency. Becoming increasingly important in foreign language teaching, it is largely neglected when assessing learner writing. Recently, several (semi-)automatic methods have been proposed to analyse the formulaic sequences in learner texts. After describing these methods and discussing their strengths and limitations, this study aims at determining the usefulness for assessing L2 text quality of collgram, a technique that assigns to each pair of contiguous words in a learner text two association scores (mutual information and t-score) computed on the basis of a large native speaker reference corpus. Correlation and hierarchical regression analyses, conducted on two datasets of English- as -a-foreign-language texts, showed that formulaic measures were the best predictors of text quality and provided a much higher specific contribution to the prediction than single-word lexical measures of diversity and sophistication. This study also confirms the need, as is being increasingly emphasized in applied linguistics, to replicate analyses on several corpora. The conclusion addresses the limits of the study and points to some potential implications for the teaching and assessment of second language writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct validity. The proposed solution draws from Zipf’s (1935) emic perspective of language, which views LD as a matter of perception, but which also assumes that competent speakers of a common language share similar perceptions. The present study tests whether this is true and specifically whether untrained human raters will show high levels of inter-rater reliability in their judgments of the levels of LD found in 60 texts extracted from a corpus of narratives written in English by a mix of language learners and native speakers. The results confirm Zipf’s assertion, but also indicate that a relatively large number of motivated raters are needed to demonstrate this tendency. The remainder of the study discusses the implications these results have for the development of an automated measure of LD to be used with learner corpora. The proposed method begins with human judgments of a representative subsample of a corpus, proceeds to a statistical model of objective measures that accurately predicts the human judgments, and ends with a multidimensional, corpus-specific automated measure that outputs reliable estimates of how a reliable group of human judges would rate the levels of LD in the texts of that corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, given the availability of corpora in several distinct languages, research on multilingual part-of-speech tagging started to grow. Amongst the novelties there is mWANN-Tagger ( m ultilingual w eightless a rtificial n eural n etwork tagger ), a weightless neural part-of-speech tagger capable of being used for mostly-suffix-oriented languages. The tagger was subjected to corpora in eight languages of quite distinct natures and had a remarkable accuracy with very low sample deviation in every one of them, indicating the robustness of weightless neural systems for part-of-speech tagging tasks. However, mWANN-Tagger needed to be tuned for every new corpus, since each one required a different parameter configuration. For mWANN-Tagger to be truly multilingual, it should be usable for any new language with no need of parameter tuning. This article proposes a study that aims to find a relation between the lexical diversity of a language and the parameter configuration that would produce the best performing mWANN-Tagger instance. Preliminary analyses suggested that a single parameter configuration may be applied to the eight aforementioned languages. The mWANN-Tagger instance produced by this configuration was as accurate as the language-dependent ones obtained through tuning. Afterwards, the weightless neural tagger was further subjected to new corpora in languages that range from very isolating to polysynthetic ones. The best performing instances of mWANN-Tagger are again the ones produced by the universal parameter configuration. Hence, mWANN-Tagger can be applied to new corpora with no need of parameter tuning, making it a universal multilingual part-of-speech tagger. Further experiments with Universal Dependencies treebanks reveal that mWANN-Tagger may be extended and that it has potential to outperform most state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers if better word representations are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined the factor structure and construct validity of lexical complexity and also unpacked its role in predicting perceived writing quality based on one data set. This study sampled 220 argumentative writings scored by expert raters from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) and used Coh-Metrix to compute the indices that tap into multiple constructs of lexical complexity. The results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirmed the hypothesized factor structure and construct validity of lexical sophistication and lexical diversity. The results of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) demonstrated that lexical sophistication and lexical diversity measured by computational indices significantly predicted human assessment of L2 writing quality at two language proficiency levels. On the other hand, human judgment on L2 writing quality was found more concerned with more perceivable text features such as linguistic errors and text length than the fine-grained features that tap into lexical complexity. Interpretations as to the small albeit significant variance explained by lexical complexity are provided in the discussion section. This study provides empirical evidence for understanding human scoring processes and implications for fine-tuning AES models to enhance their interpretability. • Factor structure and construct validity of multiple constructs tapping into lexical complexity. • Significant albeit small predictive power of lexical sophistication and lexical diversity in assessing writing. • Implications for fine-tuning AES systems to enhance interpretability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing interest in integrating reading with writing to assess academic English writing, several questions have been raised about the role of source vocabulary in test takers’ writing and, consequently, how scores from these tasks should be interpreted. The current study investigates issues related to the influence of textual borrowing on lexical diversity and the difference in lexical diversity across test scores on integrated tasks. To this end, 130 students in a Middle Eastern university completed a reading-based integrated task. The essays were analyzed for lexical diversity using CLAN software, a computer program developed to compute lexical diversity. Then to illuminate the impact of the source texts, vocabulary originating from the reading were removed from the essays, and the D index was recomputed for a lexical diversity score with borrowed vocabulary omitted. A paired samples t -test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to answer the research questions. The results showed that borrowing from source texts significantly affects the lexical diversity values in integrated writing. Further, the results demonstrated that lexical diversity plays a substantial role in integrated writing scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we discuss the results of an experiment designed to test the boundaries of linguistic imitation in a group setting. While most prior work has focused on convergence in either sound structure or syntax, we investigate whether speakers’ choices in verb morphology are influenced by others. The experiment uses an Asch-type peer pressure methodology. Participants give responses to target stimuli in a verbal and a visual task in a group of human peers, a group of robots, or alone. These results demonstrate that morphological conformity occurs, but that it is socially constrained—it happens with human peers but not with robot peers. This supports a view of linguistic convergence as a deeply social process. The level of linguistic conformity displayed by individuals is related to their degree of conformity in nonlinguistic tasks, suggesting that there are individual propensities toward peer imitation that transcend modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study simultaneously tackles conceptual, interactive, and linguistic dimension of talk. • A positive quadratic effect of teachers' lexical diversity on early literacy gains was found. • Lower student participation in Instructional Non-Present Talk displayed lower literacy gains. • High teacher participation with teachers' high lexical diversity impacted negatively in literacy. Although the relation between child-caregiver non-present talk and children's language and literacy development has been extensively studied, scarce research has examined the contributions of teacher talk's conceptual, interactive, and linguistic dimensions to early literacy. Using fine-grained linguistic analysis, lessons from 16 Chilean classrooms from Pre-K to 2nd grade were coded for: conceptual (non-instructional, instructional present, instructional non-present), interactive (teacher-student talk ratio), linguistic (syntactic complexity, lexical diversity). Students were administered baseline and end-of-year literacy assessments (n=343). Controlling for school, classroom, and individual-level factors, HLM analyses revealed a positive quadratic effect of teachers' lexical diversity on early literacy gains and a negative effect of teacher-student talk ratio, such that classrooms with greater teacher participation in instructional non-present talk tended to display lower literacy gains. A significant interaction revealed that at greater levels of teacher participation, teachers' higher lexical diversity negatively impacted literacy gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a correlational study between lexical diversity and school progression in texts written by school age children and adolescents, monolingual speakers of European Portuguese. The measure used to assess lexical diversity is D (RICHARDS; MALVERN, 1997), a mathematical correction of the TTR measure (TEMPLIN, 1957), which is based on the ratio of different words (types) to the total number of words (tokens). Using CLAN (MACWHINNEY, 2000) and IMS Open Corpus Workbench (EVERT; HARDIE, 2011) tools, this measure was applied to a quasi-longitudinal corpus consisting of 244 texts of narrative (n = 122) and argumentative (n = 122) register, written by students in the fifth (n = 26), the seventh (n = 46) and tenth (n = 50) year of the Portuguese basic schooling system. The results show that there are positive correlations between lexical diversity and school progression in both registers, although not linear from the fifth to the tenth year. To support the discussion, two examples of vocabulary variation are presented. This work aims to contribute to a more detailed understanding of the lexical development of children and adolescents written language across school progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives Cochlear implants (CIs) can considerably improve the oral language of prelingual hearing-impaired children. However, because most studies have been performed with English speaking children, available information regarding Persian-speaking children is scarce. Therefore, this study compared measures of lexical diversity (numbers of different words and total words), and syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance) in Persian-speaking children with and without CIs. Methods A cross-sectional study with 20 children with CIs and 20 typically developing children was conducted. To collect the data, the children's language samples were gathered via picture descriptions. The first 50 utterances were analyzed. Results All measures were significantly different between children with CIs and their typically developing age-matched peers, whereas no differences between children with CIs and their typically developing hearing age-matched peers were detected ( p < 0.05). Conclusions CIs have been recognized to be one of the most beneficial rehabilitation prostheses because they help children to acquire speech and language abilities similar to their typically developing hearing age-matched peers. After implantation, the performance of children with CIs is similar to the performance of normal children with the same hearing experience. The duration of the hearing experience after the implantation is an important factor for determining the development of speech and language abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how the lexical and syntactic characteristics of L2 learners’ academic writing change over the course of a one-month long intensive English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme at a British university. The participants were asked to produce two argumentative essays, at the beginning and at the end of the EAP course, which were analyzed using measures that are theoretically motivated by previous research in corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, and developmental child language acquisition. The results indicate improvements, with regard to lexical diversity, both for intermediate-level students who were preparing for undergraduate university studies in the UK and upper-intermediate level participants who were planning to continue their studies at postgraduate level. The academic argumentative texts of the students in the lower proficiency group also demonstrate development in noun-phrase complexity and in the use of genre-specific syntactic constructions. The findings suggest that despite no explicit focus on lexis and syntax in the EAP programme, by the end of the course the students’ writing exhibited a developmentally more advanced repertoire of lexical and syntactic choices that are characteristic of expository texts in academic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of “mean length of utterance” (MLU) involving morpheme counts in transcripts are widely applied to speakers of all ages and are generally interpreted as an index of developing grammar. Yet no study has examined how the growth of respiratory capacities influences MLU and numbers of forms in utterances. We review longstanding problems of MLU counts and investigate the effects of growing breath capacities using speech samples and measures of vital capacity (VC) of 50 speakers aged 5 to 27 years. The results show that VC correlates strongly with MLU, which associates with rising numbers of long lexemes. This suggests that, in normal development, the growth of VC offers the possibility of producing increasingly long utterances that can influence lexical diversity. Hence, interpreting MLU and co-varying indices of lexical development requires a consideration of the effects of maturing production processes in a perspective where developing speech and language are seen to intertwine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language practitioners and others increasingly rely on computerized assessments of large samples of written texts. In order to provide teachers and researchers with useful knowledge, new, more accurate metrics must be developed to aid in these assessments. One common aspect of such assessments is lexical diversity, or the displayed range of diversity in vocabulary. The vocd program and the metric it develops, VOCD-D, have become popular options for researchers attempting to assess lexical diversity. However, researchers have argued that this metric is in fact a complex approximation of a more direct and less variable measure derived from probability sampling, known as HD-D. Using a data set of essays written by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and native English-speakers drawn from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English, this research investigates that approximation by comparing correlations across L1 and L2 writers. In all cases, the correlations between HD-D and VOCD-D are very high, suggesting that the similarity between these metrics is indeed a product of their statistical mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]