Assessing Lexical Psychological Properties in Second Language Production: A Dynamic Semantic Similarity Approach.

Kun Sun,Xiaofei Lu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672243

Kun Sun, Xiaofei Lu

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672243

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Abstract

Previous studies of the lexical psycholinguistic properties (LPPs) in second language (L2) production have assessed the degree of an LPP dimension of an L2 corpus by computing the mean ratings of unique content words in the corpus for that dimension, without considering the possibility that learners at different proficiency levels may perceive the degree of that dimension of the same words differently. This study extended a dynamic semantic similarity algorithm to estimate the degree of five different LPP dimensions of several sub-corpora of the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database representing L2 English learners at different proficiency levels. Our findings provide initial evidence for the validity of the algorithm for assessing the LPPs in L2 production and contribute useful insights into between-proficiency relationships and cross-proficiency differences in the LPPs in L2 production as well as the relationships among different LPP dimensions.

Highlights

The lexical proficiency of second and foreign language (L2) learners1 plays a critical role in their overall language proficiency
In light of the gaps and limitations of extant research of lexical psycholinguistic properties (LPPs) in L2 learners discussed above, the present study extends a semantic similarity algorithm to estimate the degree of different LPP dimensions in L2 production
To obtain a sense of the validity of the LPP dimension scores computed by the algorithm in relation to the respective psychological constructs, we calculated the Spearman’s correlations between algorithm-computed LPP dimension scores and human ratings in the databases used in the current study, namely Brysbaert et al (2014), and Scott et al (2019)

Summary

Introduction

The lexical proficiency of second and foreign language (L2) learners plays a critical role in their overall language proficiency. The first type is that of lexical diversity, often measured using the type–token ratio (TTR) or one or more of its transformations, such as the corrected TTR or the D measure (e.g., McKee et al, 2000; Kubát and Milička, 2013) Another type is that of lexical sophistication, often measured with reference to lexical frequency, with the assumption that greater use of less frequent words may indicate higher lexical proficiency (e.g., Lu, 2012). These types of measures pertain to vocabulary breadth knowledge. Semantic size is a measure of magnitude as expressed in either concrete or abstract terms: For concrete objects, this corresponds to their physical size (e.g., the word ball has a larger semantic size than seed); for abstract concepts, this may depend on the context or affective associations (e.g., a big moment, a small problem; Sereno et al, 2009; Yao et al, 2013)

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