Lexical Diversity and Language Development: Quantification and Assessment

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:
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

About the Author :
DAVID D. MALVERN is Professor of Education, University of Reading, UK. He has been Research Officer at the Royal Society, Visiting Professor Department of Educational Psychology, McGill University, and European Union and British Council Consultant. BRIAN J. RICHARDS is Professor of Education, University of Reading, UK, and for seventeen years was an associate editor of the Journal of Child Language NGONI CHIPERE is Lecturer in Language Arts, University of the West Indies in Barbados, and author of Understanding Complex Sentences: Native Speaker Variation in Syntactic Competence published by Palgrave in 2004. PILAR DURÁN gained a PhD at Boston University and was Research Officer, University of Reading, UK, before becoming Business Development Manager at Eurobios.  

Review :
'This book represents a major contribution to the study of both lexical diversity and language development... [and] provides the most comprehensive and compelling study available to date of vocabulary measurement, including type-token ratios, number of different words, and word length. The innovative, empirically validated, and user-friendly measure of lexical diversity (VOCD - or simply D) that it proposes is based on deep understanding of mathematical models combined with rich background in language acquisition and language assessment. The culmination of fifteen years of cooperative research between David Malvern, Brian Richards, and their co-authors at the University of Reading, this study represents the best of inter-disciplinary research. In style, the book is both erudite and readable. It should be an invaluable source of reference for scholars and graduate-level students in general and psycho-linguistics, in first and second language acquisition, language education, and language pathology.' - Ruth A. Berman, Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University 'David Malvern and his co-authors have developed a new and very promising approach to the study of lexical diversity and language development. Their statistical method is far more sophisticated than anything we have had in the past. This book will be of great interest to the developmental psycholinguistic community.' - Professor Jean Berko Gleason, Department of Psychology, Boston University