Abstract
Neither linguistics nor psychology offers a single, unified notion of simplicity, and therefore the simplest “core” layer of vocabulary is hard to define in theory and hard to pinpoint in practice. In section 1 we briefly survey the main approaches, and distinguish two that are highly relevant to lexicography: we will call these common and basic. In sections 2 and 3 we compare these approaches, and in section 4 we point the reader to Kolmogorov complexity, unfamiliar as it may be to most working psychologists, lexicographers, and educators, as the best formal means to deal with core vocabulary.
Highlights
Researchers and educators have a clear intuitive sense of text simplicity, and there appears to be complete agreement that simplicity is a strong contributing factor in mastering the reading task for low literacy readers, both non-native speakers and normal language learners (Watanabe et al, 2009; Paetzold, 2016); and for people suffering from language disorders such as autism, aphasia, or dyslexia (Parr, 1993; Evans et al, 2014)
Neither linguistics nor psychology offers a single, unified notion of simplicity, and the simplest “core” layer of vocabulary is hard to define in theory and hard to pinpoint in practice (Borin, 2012)
Ordinal measures: Perhaps the single most popular measure in psychology and survey research is the Likert scale, typically 5 points which in our case would be “very simple, simple, neither simple not complex, complex, very complex,” but more detailed (7, 9, or 11 point) scales are used quite often, and Pearse, 2011 concluded that even 21 points could be helpful to the researcher
Summary
Researchers and educators have a clear intuitive sense of text simplicity, and there appears to be complete agreement that simplicity is a strong contributing factor in mastering the reading task for low literacy readers, both non-native speakers and normal language learners (Watanabe et al, 2009; Paetzold, 2016); and for people suffering from language disorders such as autism, aphasia, or dyslexia (Parr, 1993; Evans et al, 2014). (see Zamanian and Heydari, 2012 for a recent survey) tend to concentrate on automatically measurable factors such as the length of words and sentences. In this paper we will concentrate on the contribution of the vocabulary, taken to include morphological complexity as well, at the expense of syntactic measures. This is justified both by pure information-theoretic considerations (Kornai, 2019) and by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies (Fedorenko et al, 2020). We begin with a general survey of approaches to simplicity in the physical, biological, computational, psychological, and cognitive sciences, especially as language can be investigated from all these viewpoints.
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