El lèxic català i castellà en els escolars valencians de 3r d’educació primària. Caracterització des de la disponibilitat lèxica

The purpose of this study was to examine construct validity of methods of calculating lexical diversity in written narrative samples relative to children's performance on a reading vocabulary measure. For 234 children in 1st-5th grade, written narratives were examined and compared between grades for number of different words (NDW), total words (TNW), NDW in a truncated 50 word sample, and type token ratio (TTR). The relationship between lexical diversity in written narratives and a standardized reading vocabulary measure (GMRT-4) was analyzed by comparing correlations. Grade differences were observed in measures of lexical diversity and productivity. Lexical diversity showed a significant moderate correlation with the GMRT-4. NDW had a stronger relationship to GMRT-4 scores than TTR for participants in first and second grade. Considering length (TNW, NDW constrained to 50 words, or TTR) did not result in a stronger relationship with reading vocabulary. Following additional study establishing probe equivalence, NDW in written narratives may be an efficient, educationally relevant, marker of language maturity and a good predictor of performance on a standardized reading vocabulary measure.

This study aims to ascertain whether a shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment influences the narratives produced by the children. Participants were 20 typically developing (TD) children and 10 children with language impairment (LI), aged 6 to 8 years. They were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with two different presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro- and macrostructure. Microstructural variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (total number of different words, number of internal state terms). Macrostructural variables included cohesion measures (number of complete, incomplete and error ties) and story structure scores measured by the Afrikaans translation (Klop, Visser and Oosthuizen 2012a) of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives© (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012). Both presentation methods elicited narratives of similar quality in terms of the micro- and macrostructural variables in all the groups. A shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment therefore did not influence the narratives produced by children with LI and TD children.

Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advance. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the acquisition of Hebrew by Arab students in Israel: level of abstractness, lexical diversity, and density lexical. My corpus consisted of fifty essays written in Hebrew by 9th and 11th graders. The quantitative analysis reveals several findings. First, abstractness increases with subjects’ age, as expected. The density test, however, did not show the expected increase in density with age. I suspect the reason for this is relatively high density in younger pupils’ essays, indicating lack of cohesion rather than high linguistic competence. The national high school language curriculum for eleventh graders focuses on connectivity, which causes a decrease in density. Third, the diversity test also did not yield statistically significant findings, probably because this test is influenced by text length, which in the ninth grade still does not enable a reliable test. Conclusions: The lexical measures can be divided into two types: basic tests, that can be applied at any level of competence; and advanced tests, which require a high level of competence. Level of abstractness is of the first type: it is effective as a measure of progress in L2 acquisition even in the initial stages of acquisition, while diversity and density require a higher competence level. Â

The imperfective paradox in a second language: A dynamic completion-entailment test

The rural epic “Metai” (Seasons of the Year) by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a milestone of Lithuanian literature, has enjoyed the status of similar literary writings viewed as a ‘must’ for being translated into different languages. Up to now, translations of “Metai” have appeared in 13 different languages (Armenian, Byelorussian, Czech, English, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian). As regards translations into English, the poem was not translated in full until 1967; the translation was carried out by Nadas Rastenis and published in Los Angeles. The other complete translation of “Metai” is almost 20 years apart, performed by Peter Tempest and published in 1985. The present analysis aims to find out which of the opposing strategies – foreignization or domestication – is more consistently employed in the two English translations (on the macrolevel). The specific research questions on the micro-level concern two text properties, lexical density and lexical diversity, in the source-text and the two translations. These parameters were evaluated using corpus linguistics methodology and tools. The overall evaluation of the domesticating and foreignizing strategies employed in the two translations demonstrates that each of them is applied to a certain degree. The domestication is fair, revealing respect for the original, the author and the reader, whereas foreignizing strategies are mainly seen on the discoursal, generic level. The translators tried to balance the two approaches for the target reader to be able to appreciate both, the specificity of the cultural content and the fluent domesticated narrative. As for the lexico-semantic level, the highest lexical density was found in the analyzed Lithuanian data (excerpts from the poem), reaching over 62%, while the two translations show statistically important lower density, roughly about 54% each. This means that about 8% of content words were lost in the translations. With respect to lexical diversity, N. Rastenis with a 789-word text seems to be more loquacious than P. Tempest (the total number of words – 654).

Language is an interesting characteristic that is unique to humans. Language represents a method of human communication and is believed to reflect a person’s view of reality (Kramsch 2004). The words used by a person or a community provide insight into the ideas, concepts, and worldview held by people (Pennebaker et al. 2003). In science, publications represent a primary form of communication of ideas among scientists. Publications provide a historical record of a discipline and reflect the relative interest of a scientific community in particular concepts during a given era (Kim et al. 2018). Consequently, how word use in publications changes over time can provide valuable insight into the evolution of a discipline and help identify possible shifts in thinking of the scientific community (McCallen et al. 2019). Quail science is a research domain that is over a century old. Studies of the life history and ecology of quail began appearing by the late 1800s, and investigations into the management of quail were circulating by the early 1900s (Bent 1932). Research on quail continued and increased during the 20th century and remains active at the beginning of the new millennium. Despite this long-term and active research trajectory, quail science appears to be a stagnant domain of research, with the same general topics being investigated decade after decade (Hernández 2021). I explore this qualitative impression of quail science and quantitatively assess the level of novelty in quail research. My goal is to address 2 general questions: 1) What are the main themes of quail research? and 2) How has the frequency of these themes changed over time? My research hypothesis is that, although the amount of quail research has increased over the past century, the cognitive territory covered by this research has remained more or less the same. Addressing this hypothesis requires the definition of a few linguistical terms and concepts. In linguistics, tokens is the total number of words in a sample, and types is the number of different words in that sample (Malvern et al. 2004). For example, the phrase, “The bison herd grazed on the plains” has 7 tokens. Because 2 of the tokens represent a repetition (the word “the”), the phrase contains only 6 types. Linguistic scientists have used the ratio of types (number of different words) to tokens (total number of words) as a measure of lexical diversity, that is, the level of vocabulary richness (Malvern

Despite support for the use of conversational language measures, concerns remain regarding the extent to which they may be confounded with aspects of child temperament, extraversion in particular. This study of 161 twins from the Western Reserve Reading Project (WRRP) examined the associations between children's conversational language use and three key aspects of child temperament: Surgency (i.e., introversion/extraversion), Effortful Control (i.e., attention and task persistence) and Negative Affectivity (e.g., fear, anger, sadness). Child biological sex was considered as a possible moderating factor. Correlational analyses were conducted between aspects of temperament during early school-age years (i.e., 7-8 years), as measured by the Children's Behavior Questionnaire-Short Form (CBQ), and six different measures of children's conversational language use: total number of complete and intelligible utterances (TCICU), number of total words (NTW), mean length of utterance (MLU), total number of conjunctions (TNC), number of different words (NDW) and measure D (i.e., a measure of lexical diversity). Values for NTW, TNC and NDW were derived both on the entire sample and on the first 100 C-units. Correlations between language and temperament were compared between girls and boys using the Fisher r-to-z transformation to examine the significance of potential moderating effects. Children's reported variability in Effortful Control did not correlate significantly with any of the child language measures. In contrast, children's Negative Affectivity and Surgency tended to demonstrate positive, albeit modest, correlations with those conversational language measures that were derived from the sample as a whole, rather than from a standardized number of utterances. MLU, as well as measures of NDW and NTW derived from standardized sample lengths of 100 C-units, did not correlate with any measure of child temperament. TNC demonstrated an unexpected negative correlation with child Surgency when it was derived from a standardized number of C-units, but not when derived from the entire sample length. Child biological sex did not moderate the significant associations between language and temperament measures. Overall, measures that control for volubility did not correlate significantly with child temperament; however, measures that reflected volubility tended to correlate weakly with some aspects of temperament, particularly Surgency. Results provide a degree of discriminant evidence for the validity of MLU and measures of type (i.e., NDW) and token use (i.e., NTW) when derived from a standardized number of utterances.

Aims and Objectives: This article proposes the “scalpel model,” a new model of third and additional language (L3/Ln) acquisition. The model aims to identify and examine what happens beyond the initial state of acquisition and what factors may influence change from one state of knowledge to another. Methodology: The article briefly examines the currently proposed hypotheses and models and evaluates the existing evidence for their predictions. It highlights several cognitive and experiential factors affecting crosslinguistic influence that are not taken into account by the current models. These factors include: structural linguistic complexity; misleading input or lack of clear unambiguous evidence for some properties or constructions; construction frequency in the target L3; and prevalent language activation or use. Data and analysis: Findings of recently published research are discussed in support of the scalpel model. In particular, findings of differential learnability of properties within the same groups of learners suggest that L1 or L2 transfer happens property by property and is influenced by diverse factors. Findings: The scalpel model explicitly argues that wholesale transfer of one of the previously acquired languages does not happen at the initial stages of acquisition because it is not necessary. It also argues that transfer can be from the L1 or the L2 or both, but it is not only facilitative. Originality: The new model increases the explanatory coverage of the current experimental findings on how the L3/Ln linguistic representations develop. Implications: The model emphasizes the importance of the cognitive, experiential, and linguistic influences on the L3/Ln beyond transfer from the L1 or L2. Thus, it aligns L3/Ln acquisition with current debates within L2 acquisition theory.

Transcription is an important component of the writing process that affects the quality of children’s compositions. However, little is known about how transcription mode influences productivity or spelling accuracy, two word-level markers of compositional quality, among children learning to write in an additional language. To address this issue, we compared the effects of handwriting and keyboarding on text length and spelling in the compositions of L2 French learners. Grade 2 to 4 students (n = 48) in French Immersion were given two writing prompts and asked to produce one text on paper and one using a keyboard. The prompts were counterbalanced across the two writing conditions. The total number of words, total number of words spelled correctly, and proportion of correctly spelled words were calculated. A series of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed an advantage in both the average number of correctly spelled words and the proportion of correctly spelled words in the students’ compositions favouring the keyboarding condition. Conversely, the total number of words across conditions was not significantly different. Our findings suggest that keyboarding may offer an advantage over handwriting with respect to spelling accuracy in the context of L2 composition in the elementary years.

Objectives: This study examined the characteristics of parental linguistic input in children with cochlear implants (CIs) based on their language development levels. It focused on identifying semantic, syntactic, and discourse features of parental linguistic input that influence their children’s language development.Methods: The study included 34 parent-child dyads, consisting of hearing parents and their young children with CIs aged 1-4 years. Participants were divided into two groups: language catch-up and non-catch-up groups, classified using standardized language assessments. Parent-child interactions were recorded during a 20-minute free play session, and parental linguistic input was analyzed in three dimensions: semantics (number of total words, number of different words), syntax (mean length of utterance in words, number of clauses per utterance), and discourse (mean turn length, proportion of well-timed turn).Results: Parents of the catch-up group demonstrated higher lexical diversity and longer utterances compared to the non-catch-up group. They also exhibited significantly higher proportions of well-timed responses in discourse. Regression analysis revealed that lexical diversity and well-timed turn proportions were significant predictors of the language age of children with CIs.Conclusion: The findings underscore the critical role of parental linguistic input, particularly in terms of lexical diversity and timely responses, in facilitating language development in children with CIs. These insights provide valuable implications for developing parent coaching programs aimed at enhancing facilitative language strategies tailored to young children with CIs.

Oral narratives are important for assessing children as narratives provide useful information about children's language development. This study aimed to explore how the narrative skills of Cypriot-Greek speaking children develop in the domains of syntactic productivity, complexity, and lexical diversity, during their preschool and primary school years. Additionally, the study sought to determine whether there was any difference in the performance of boys and girls on the narrative measures. One hundred and twenty-nine 4–9-year-old typically developing Cypriot-Greek-speaking children were recruited for the study. The Renfrew Bus Story was administered to elicit narratives, and microstructure measures were calculated and analysed. The results showed that there were developmental changes in three measures of syntactic productivity (number of C-units and total number of words) and lexical diversity (number of different words). On the contrary, measures of syntactic complexity (MLU-word, number of subordinate clauses and mean of the five longest sentences) did not significantly differentiate children between the three groups. In addition, the results showed no significant gender effect on narrative skills. This study provides initial evidence in retelling narrative development patterns on typically developing Cypriot-Greek-speaking children. Speech and language therapists can use this knowledge to compare children’s performance and detect children who are at high risk of experiencing language disorders.

A Diversidade Lexical (DiL) e a Densidade Lexical (DeL) podem caracterizar textos pertencentes a um determinado genero, relacionando-os com sua riqueza lexical e com a quantidade de informacoes que contem. Este estudo pretende analisar a presenca desses dois aspectos em textos produzidos por alunos portugueses de 7 anos de idade na mesma sala de aula (2o ano), estudando textos escritos individualmente e em diades. A partir de oito propostas de producao textual, nas quais o professor pediu a 12 alunos que inventassem historias, constituimos um corpus com 24 producoes individuais e 36 producoes em duplas. A unidade de medida adotada para DiL foi a TTR. Para calcular a DeL, foi dividido o numero total de itens lexicais pelo total de palavras escritas em cada texto produzido. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que a DeL entre os textos individuais e os textos em dupla e estavel, sem variacao significativa. No entanto, para DiL, esses textos mostram uma maior variacao, e uma relacao inversamente proporcional. Comparando apenas as producoes individuais, verificou-se uma tendencia para o aumento da DeL, especialmente nas producoes que tiveram baixa pontuacao na 1a proposta. Foi perceptivel uma tendencia de aumento da quantidade de palavras entre as duas producoes individuais dos alunos. Apesar de esse fato sugerir que os alunos comecaram a escrever textos mais longos, a tendencia decrescente de DiL permaneceu ao longo das producoes.Palavras-chave: texto escolar, escrita colaborativa, densidade lexical, diversidade lexical.

The aim of this study was to determine whether measures of lexical diversity (LD) can be used to assess general lexical knowledge. This study focused on 30 sequential Croatian/Italian bilinguals aged between 5 and 7 years, who were compared with 30 Croatian and 30 Italian monolinguals matched in age. LD was assessed from narrative language samples using standard measures and compared with Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) results. Two LD measures, the type-token ratio (TTR) and Maas Index based on TTR transformation, did not differentiate between bilinguals and monolinguals, whereas several other did: total number of words (NTW), number of different words (NDW), measure D, moving average type-token ratio (MATTR) and hypergeometric diversity of D (HD-D). NTW, NDW, D, MATTR and HD-D were predictive of PPVT results for monolinguals, whereas NDW, TNW and D (with replacements, Dr) were predictive of PPVT results for bilinguals. Our results suggest that LD measures can be reliable measures of bilinguals’ vocabulary knowledge and can adequately reflect PPVT results in languages other than English.

This study explores the effects of source texts on high school EFL students’ writing performances. The participants, consisting of four groups, were 120 high school second year students in a regular high school in a metropolitan city. Two source texts with different degrees of linguistic difficulty and topic familiarity were used. The effect of the source text was measured by comparing the participants’ pre- and post-writing products focusing on six text features (i.e., total number of words, number of sentences, mean number of words per sentence, lexical diversity, left embeddedness, and number of modifiers per noun phrase). Additionally, a questionnaire survey was also administered to obtain information about students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward the use of a source text for writing. According to the result, the effect of the source text, regardless of the linguistic difficulty, was more prominent in the increased number of words when the topic was more familiar. In addition, the survey result showed that with a proper instructional strategy writing can also be an important ingredient to develop in high school English classes. Based on the result, the study concludes that the use of a source text on a familiar topic can contribute to improving high school EFL students’ writing performances as well as enhancing their overall confidences in writing.

Introduction: Personal narratives are monological stories based on a personal experience that help children explain and understand their emotional states, as well as process positive and negative experiences. The aim of this study was to identify age- and emotion-related traits of lexical and grammatical abilities and coherence of personal stories produced by school-aged children between 7 and 13 years. Methods: A total of 60 typically developing children, speakers of Croatian, were stratified into three groups according to age. Using the Global TALES protocol, each child was asked to produce six personal stories prompted by different emotional states. The personal narratives were analysed using measures of lexical diversity (lemma-token ratio and number of different words), productivity (total number of words), and syntactic complexity (mean length of utterances and clausal density). Based on the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme, three coherence dimensions (context, chronology, and theme) were rated. Results: Age group was shown to explain 18% of the variance in the ability to produce personal narratives. Personal narratives elicited through positive prompts were overall more lexically diverse but were significantly less elaborated chronologically and thematically than negative and neutral narratives. Conclusion: This study showed that coherence of the produced stories was connected with the child’s lexicon and that both variables – lexicon and coherence – were influenced by emotional valence of the story. In contrast, grammatical aspects of the narrative were influenced only by age. Finally, it is possible to state that the Global TALES protocol is sensitive enough to capture specificities of creating personal stories, both developmental ones and those created under the influence of the emotional valence of the prompts.