Lexical Density Research Articles

LEXICAL DENSITY AND GRAMMATICAL INTRICACY IN DEBATERS’ SPEECHES

This paper entitled “Lexical Density and Grammatical Intricacy in Debaters’ speeches (Case Study of National University Debating Championship 2018)” discusses the lexical density and grammatical intricacy to identify the level of lexical density and grammatical intricacy in debaters’ speeches conducted by means of descriptive qualitative method. The theories supporting this thesis are the ones proposed by Ure, Halliday, and Simon Quinn. The data source in this thesis were debate speech from Main Grand Final round of NUDC 2018 which are Opening Government team (Prime Minfister and Deputy Prime Minister) and Opening Opposition team (Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Leader of the Opposition) taken from youtube video of NUDC 2018, Malang. The data in this study were lexical items for lexical density and clauses for grammatical intricacy. The step passed in this analysis are collecting the data by transcribing the debate speech into text, identifying the lexical items and clauses, and concluding the analysis. The result of this thesis shows that lexical density and grammatical intricacy of Prime Minister = 40.95 % and 3.43, Deputy Prime Minister = 42.44% and 2.72, Leader of the Opposition = 46.14% and 2.91, and Deputy Leader of the Opposition = 47.90% and 3. Thus, both the level of lexical density and grammatical intricacy in debaters’ speeches account for higher density and intricacy, so debaters’ speeches represent much information due to many lexical items as the proportion of running words and indicate that clause complex is more dominant than simple sentence.

A Critical Comparison between Manufacturing and Service Firms’ Mission Statements: Manage Your Firms’ Mission Statements with Care Using Readability and Lexical Techniques

This paper aims to investigate the Readability and Lexical Density of the mission statements of the large service and manufacturing firms. In respect of mission statements, a comparison between the service and manufacturing firms is drawn. For initial data arrangement, the mission statements of all selected service firms are grouped together, same was also done with the manufacturing firms separately. The mission statements are processed through the software for Readability (Gunning Fog, Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, Automated, Flesch Reading Ease score) and Lexical Density analysis in two categories, service firms and manufacturing firms. Result show that Service firms’ mission statements are more Lexically dense and possess higher average level than those of the manufacturing firms. This study contributes to the Strategic Management literature and practical implications to the service and manufacturing firms and their stakeholders. Also comes out of the ole ways of data analysis in management studies. Future researchers may carry out similar research in a specific industry.

An Analysis of Lexical Chunks in Online Business Letters (OBL) and Business Letter Corpus (BLC): A Corpus-Based Study

This research investigated into the lexical density and frequencies of five types of lexical chunks located in 300 online business letters. Top 10 websites on business correspondence had been identified in terms of traffic visitors and bounce rate under one million web rankings worldwide. Criterion Sampling method was identified prior to extracting the sample letters from the websites. The data was then run with Antconc Concordance Program (ACP) for lexical density and frequency analysis. Top 15 lexical chunks in online business letters (OBL) were compared against those top 15 in Business Letter Corpus (BLC). Findings revealed that there was a total of 39 916-word tokens and 939 counts of lexical chunks found in this corpus. It was found that more lexical words do not imply more lexical chunks used in based on types of business letters. All 5 types of lexical chunks were identified and ranked in descending order; Sentence Builders (SB) as the most frequent type, followed by Collocations (COL), Deictic locutions (DLs), Polywords (POLs) and Institutionalized Expressions (IUs) as the least frequent type of lexical chunk. Sub-divisional analysis indicated that Grammatical Collocations (GCs) were more common than Lexical Collocations (LCs). Majority of lexical chunks were formed more at sentence level than phrasal level. Comparative analysis between top 15 lexical chunks in OBL and BLC discovered that most top lexical chunks in online business letters are representative of those corporate business letters in BLC. Pedagogical implications in terms of the reliability of online business letters for academic reference and future research considerations are also addressed.

Good Text in, Good Text out: The Impact of Extensive Reading on Lexical Complexity in Second Language Writing

Extensive reading (ER) is widely agreed to improve L2 learners’ vocabulary and writing, but the precise effects that ER has on particular characteristics of L2 vocabulary used in L2 writing remain unclear. To address this issue, university level Korean EFL learners in an L2 essay writing class engaged in extensive reading over a semester and wrote argumentative essays about a topic of their choosing. These essays were analyzed for two key indicators of lexical complexity (i.e., lexical density and number of different words) using a computerized text analysis tool. Analysis results generally affirmed previous studies’ conclusions that ER has a positive influence on L2 writing adding that the more words learners read, the greater variety of words they used in their essays. Likewise, in accord with other research showing gains in English word recognition and recall, learners’ perceptions about the difficulty of their ER materials had an effect on the lexical density of their written essays thus providing additional evidence that ER impacts L2 vocabulary use in essay writing. Somewhat unexpectedly, learners’ perceived enjoyment had no effect on either lexical complexity variable which indicates that, contrary to some claims, selecting reading material based on its entertainment value may not actually lead to vocabulary development in L2 writing.

Academic language in Catalan students’ research reports across levels of study

AbstractWhen students engage in a research community of practice they not only have to master academic register but also discourse features embodied in the research genre. This corpus-based study examines lexico-grammatical features and stance and engagement markers in 54 Catalan (Romance language) research reports in biology, from high school twelfth-graders and university master theses’ writers. These texts belong to the TARBUC corpus (Treballs Acadèmics de Recerca de Batxillerat i Universitat en Català) – Baccalaureate and University Academic Research Reports written in Catalan. Analyses reveal a statistically significant increase in syntactic complexity and lexical density in university writers. Furthermore, findings on interactional function indicate that marking of stance (i.e., hedges) correlates with a specific type of engagement marker (i.e., directive to argument) in university students’ texts. Self-mention is the most salient rhetorical strategy used by students, in line with the requirements of the research article published in this discipline. Finally, overall data on the distribution of interactional markers suggest that the conventions of the research article genre constrain interactional strategies from high school onwards. Results suggest that linguistic literacy, cognitive maturity and the genre’s social convention interact in a linked process in the development of a skilled writer.

Оцінка когерентності тексту на основі графа узгодженості словосполучень для виявлення симптомів шизофренії

Different state-of-the-art methods of the detection of schizophrenia symptoms based on the estimation of text coherence have been analyzed. The analysis of a text at the level of phrases has been suggested. The method based on the graph of the consistency of phrases has been proposed to evaluate the semantic coherence and the cohesion of a text. The semantic coherence, cohesion, and other linguistic features (lexical diversity, lexical density) have been taken into account to form feature vectors for the training of a model-classifier. The training of the classifier has been performed on the set of English-language interviews. According to the retrieved results, the impact of each feature on the output of the model has been analyzed. The results obtained can indicate that the proposed method based on the graph of the consistency of phrases may be used in the different tasks of the detection of mental illness.

O Planejamento leva à Perfeição? Os Efeitos de Diferentes Condições de Planejamento Pré-Tarefa sobre o Desempenho Oral em L2

Este artigo reporta um estudo que investigou os efeitos de diferentes condições de planejamento pré-tarefa sobre o desempenho oral em L2. Vinte e seis aprendizes de inglês de um instituto de línguas realizaram uma tarefa oral na qual tiveram de descrever três figuras, cada uma por um minuto, sob as seguintes condições: não-planejamento, planejamento oral e planejamento escrito. O desempenho oral dos participantes foi examinado em termos de fluência (speech rate unpruned e speech rate pruned), acurácia gramatical (erros por 100 palavras) e densidade lexical (proporção de palavras produzidas com propriedades gramaticais e lexicais). As medidas de produção oral foram comparadas estatisticamente de acordo com as condições de planejamento, seguindo um design intra-sujeitos. Os resultados mostram que, em geral, planejar afetou positivamente a performance oral em L2, especialmente a fluência. Os aprendizes realizaram melhor a tarefa quando tiveram pelo menos um minuto para elaborar sua fala quando comparado à condição que não dispunha de tempo de planejamento. Entretanto, ao comparar as condições oral e escrita, uma não se sobressaiu a outra, possivelmente pelo modo como foram operacionalizadas. Interpretado de outra forma, isto pode indicar que o planejamento pré-tarefa seja benéfico independentemente da forma que assuma. Este estudo de pequena escala pode contribuir para discussões teóricas acerca da produção oral em L2 e o tratamento pedagógico do planejamento oral na sala de aula de L2.

L2 Reading Comprehension and Lexical Usage in Writing by Summarizing Instruction

This study aimed to examine how explicit summarizing instruction and practices can influence reading comprehension and lexical usage in writing by Korean EFL learners in classroom contexts. For the study, the value of summarizing in L2 learning and lexical usage in writing were discussed. The results showed that learners could significantly better understand reading passages than before the summarizing intervention. In lexical diversity, overall learners could use more diverse and advanced lexical items in post-compositions. The average TTR (type/token ratio) for three word lists, the 2nd 1000 word list, academic word list (AWL), and not-in-the-list words (NLW), increased significantly, whereas that of the 1st 1000 list decreased slightly in the post-writings. In terms of lexical sophistication measured by the total number of tokens in both AWL and NLW, learners showed significantly higher degrees of AWL, with slightly more in NLW in their post-writings. This positive effect would appear to be attributed to integrated summarizing processes with reading source texts about different topics, while deleting unimportant information and focusing on key words, phrases or sentence level comprehension for bottom-up processes, which was followed by output activities that transferred those expressions into their writing through sentence combination, paraphrasing, syntactic transformation and invention with dictionary use, teacher modelling and feedback.

Measure What You Treat: Using Language Sample Analysis for Grammatical Outcome Measures in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose Language sample analysis (LSA) is commonly used to monitor progress for children with language disorders (Pavelko et al., 2016). For children with grammar goals, pediatric speech-language pathologists report mean length of utterance (MLU) and type–token ratio (TTR) as the two LSA measures most commonly used (Finestack & Satterlund, 2018). For focused grammatical intervention, these measures may be ineffective in capturing treatment growth. In this clinical focus article, we provide a preliminary comparison of four measures that could be considered as progress monitoring tools following intervention for one finiteness marker. Method Pre- and posttreatment spontaneous language samples from six children with developmental language disorder who underwent treatment for the third-person singular –s ( –3s ) morpheme were analyzed qualitatively. Four measures are reported: MLU, TTR, percent accuracy of –3s , and Tense and Agreement Productivity score of –3s (cf. Hadley & Short, 2005). Results Increases were most common across participants in measures that examined use of the treatment target (i.e., percent accuracy and Tense and Agreement Productivity score of –3s ). Changes in MLU were not always congruent with measures of the treatment target. Change was mostly not appreciable for TTR. Conclusions For preschool-aged children with developmental language disorder, MLU and TTR may not be effective as the sole outcome measures following treatment of –3s. Our six case studies highlight the benefit of measuring the treated skill as discretely as possible and with multiple measures. More research is needed into the use of LSA for outcome measures in children with language disorders.

Language of Vietnamese School Science Textbooks

In this article, an attempt is made to explore in some depth the transitivity features of seven lessons (texts) of a Vietnamese science textbook – Sinh h?c 8 (Biology 8). The findings show that in constructing biological knowledge in their texts, the Vietnamese biologists as textbook writers have employed very high frequency of material and relational processes, virtually no behavioural process, very low percentage of mental, verbal and existential processes, relative small number of circumstances, high percentage of participants/Subjects, high lexical density, high frequency of grammatical metaphor, and only two types of expansion clause complex: elaboration and enhancement. These transitivity features constitute part of what Halliday (2005a: 59) refers to as the ‘prototypical syndrome’ that characterizes the language of Vietnamese school science textbooks. They explain in part why the language of school science textbooks often creates a feeling of ‘alienation’ (Halliday and Martin, 1993: 2) to school students.

Designing Learning Outcomes in Design Higher Education Curricula

AbstractNew and flexible educational paradigms, based on creative, innovative and open‐minded competences, are required in the development of curricula in design, working as an essential skill toolkit for future designers, particularly in higher education. This study aims to explore how learning outcomes, usually expressed by the knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes and competences expected to be achieved by students as a result of an educational experience, are defined and formulated in design study programmes in Portugal. The investigation relies on the linguistic analysis of a corpus composed of a collection of learning outcomes extracted from the Portuguese undergraduate and post‐graduate study programmes in design. The analysis was performed through the application of natural language tools and resources to that corpus. Specifically, we used computational lexicons and grammars to gather information on word frequency, lexical density, syntactic distribution and the morphology used in texts. Additional discourse dimensions, such as the length of sentences, the frequency of specific linguistic patterns, and the presence of subjective items, like evaluative adjectives, were also considered. Results suggest that Portuguese design and art higher education institutions are committed to follow the learning outcomes recommendations, trying to identify measurable ‘design’ skills. Moreover, the results show that, despite of being confined to 1,000 characters, learning outcomes are expressed differently, both in terms of lexicon and grammar, depending on the study cycles, fostering the idea that skills and competences required become more complex as the level of qualification increases.

From the Editors

In a recent survey study by Finestack and Sutterland (2018), formal language sample analysis (LSA) was reportedly used frequently to evaluate child language outcomes by less than a third of speech-language pathologists who provided early intervention services or who worked with elementary-aged children. The respondents indicated they most often employed mean length of utterance and type-token ratio as outcome measures when using language sampling as an evaluation tool for their clients. These survey results, along with results from other such surveys (e.g., Pavelko, Owens, Ireland, & Hahs-Vaughn, 2016; Westerveld & Claessen, 2014), were the impetus for this issue of Topics in Language Disorders, edited by Dr. Cheryl Scott. The group of articles in this issue addresses the potential for LSA to help identify spoken and written language difficulties, determine important therapeutic goals, and effectively monitor treatment progress when working with individuals who are at risk for or have been identified with a language disorder. These articles also shed light on many shortcomings of conventional LSA and associated measures (such as those mentioned earlier), while offering suggestions for overcoming at least some of these shortcomings using novel approaches and measures. We hope that these articles will inspire more practitioners and researchers to use formal LSA in their work on behalf of children and adults with language impairments and to think “outside the box” about the possibilities of LSA as a vital diagnostic and outcomes assessment tool. We suspect in the next decade or so, as efforts to deploy automation (e.g., the LENA [Language Environment Analysis] system) and artificial intelligence in linguistic applications (e.g., machine learning and natural language processing) continue to accelerate and improve, that the collection, transcription, and extraction of data from contextual language samples will be afforded without great effort or much time on the part of the clinician or researcher. The coupling of new and neglected clinical applications and measures discussed in this collection of articles with advances in technology and computing pose exciting future prospects for LSA, but as we see in this issue, LSA has much to offer even now. —Gary A. Troia, PhD, CCC-SLP Co-Editor —Sarah E. Wallace, PhD, CCC-SLP Co-Editor

Developing Lexical Richness among EFL Students: Effect of Morphological Awareness Training on Writing Performance

this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of morphological awareness training program in developing lexical richness among first-year English majors at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Translation, Misr University for Science and Technology in terms of lexical density and variation. Quasi-experimental method was adopted with its pretest-posttest control group design. A training program on morphological awareness was developed to fulfill the purpose of the study. Sixty students participated in the study; ( 30 ) in the experimental group and (30) in the control group . The results pinpointed the effectiveness of morphological awareness training program in developing lexical richness among EFL majors in favor of the posttest of lexical density and variation among the experimental group students. The study recommended training teachers on morphological awareness to help their students develop their lexical richness.

Lexical Richness of One-Minute Speaking Task by Science and Technology University Students

Driven by Coxhead’s question “What vocabulary do ESP learners need?”, this study aims to investigate the quality of vocabulary use by measuring lexical richness (lexical diversity, lexical sophistication and lexical density) of speech production in ESP classroom context. The data was collected from 100 first year university students while performing a speaking task. Drawing on D_tools and AntWordProfiler, we made measures of diversity and sophistication. TagAnt was applied for calculating percentages of lexical density. Furthermore, a scale-based approach was employed for technical identification. The results revealed that vocabulary produced by the students was mainly from GSL1000 word list. Lexical density of the speech was 43.72% and the lexical diversity was moderately rich with a value of D 58.8. This study suggests needs of productive vocabulary in ESP classroom contexts. The results of this study imply that ESP students need a great awareness that they are parts of a particular group. To achieve the goal of learning, they are required possession of disciplinary knowledge and skills of the area they belong.

Syntactic complexity in assessing young adolescent EFL learners’ writings: Syntactic elaboration and diversity

This study investigates the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing quality, measured by both syntactic elaboration and diversity, based on 410 narrative essays of adolescent beginner and intermediate Chinese EFL learners. Syntactic elaboration measures were analyzed by the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer. Syntactic diversity was measured by the corrected type-token ratio of dependency relations, a new metric proposed by this study. Three regression analyses were conducted, each with writing scores as an outcome variable, but the syntactic elaboration model employed traditional syntactic elaboration measures as explanatory variables; the syntactic diversity model employed the syntactic diversity measure; and the combined model used all of the measures. The results show that 1) syntactic elaboration measures account for 36.6% of the variance in writing scores, with mean length of sentence, complex nominals per clause, and clauses per T-unit as the best predictors; 2) the syntactic diversity measure alone could predict 32.1% of the variance in writing scores; 3) the combined model, including both syntactic elaboration and syntactic diversity measures, could explain 45.3% of the variance (the largest amount of variance in the study) in writing scores.

An analysis of the structure and brevity of preliminary clinical evaluations describing traumatic abnormalities on extremity x-ray images

IntroductionThe preliminary clinical evaluation (PCE) system involves the radiographer providing an immediate comment highlighting an abnormality on the x-ray image. This can be a valuable service development though it must be recognised that the structure of the PCE may impede its usefulness. This study aimed to assess radiographers’ ability to form a concise description of radiographic abnormalities by evaluating their structure and brevity. MethodA convenience sampling approach was used and the study was open to all radiographers (n = 48) in a United Kingdom (UK) hospital. Participants provided a PCE for 35 abnormal appendicular cases, which were assessed for the number of words used, lexical density and Gunning-Fog index; comparisons were made with a gold standard. PCE accuracy was evaluated with a scoring system and statistical analysis was completed with SPSS. Results21 participants took part. The mean (SD,range) words used was greater than the gold standard (9.5 (3.89,14.9) vs 5.6 (1.46,7)). The mean (SD,range) lexical density was lower than the gold standard (73.8 (4.02,20.1) vs 100 (0,0)), and the mean Gunning-Fog index was also lower (15.1 (3.79,18.3) vs 20.7 (6.82,22.6)). The mean (SD,range) PCE score was 2.8 (0.34,1.17), compared to 5 (0,0) for the gold standard, and this was a statistically significant difference (t (21) = -29,p = .001). ConclusionParticipants used too many words in their PCE comments with reduced descriptive content that did not match the reading level of the gold standard. Areas for suggested improvement in practice include introduction of a comment-forming model with additional education. These findings provide an interesting addition to the growing PCE knowledge base. Implications for practiceDedicated training prior to implementation and participation, to standardise comment structure, could improve the effectiveness of the PCE system.

A distinct aspectual analysis of predicative possession in Brazilian Portuguese

We provide an aspectual analysis of Brazilian Portuguese predicative possessives, ter ('have') NP vs. estar com ('to be with') NP, which have been analyzed as denoting permanent versus temporary possession, respectively. Data include 20th century tokens of estar com NP (n=553) and ter NP (n=2976) from Davies' Corpus do Português. These data show that both possessive constructions can occur with the same temporal/aspectual reference and possessum, but that ter NP has a 0.55 type-token ratio while estar com NP shows significantly lower (p<0.01) productivity (0.41). An online experimental survey in which we manipulated the possessum and the duration of the possession was designed and responded to by over 200 native Brazilian participants. Results show that while both forms are possible in all contexts they are nevertheless sensitive to the duration of the possession, thus suggesting that the association with permanent versus temporary possession is pragmatic in nature. We propose that estar com NP’s possessive interval is co-extensive with the reference interval supplied by context, while ter NP’s possessive interval is a superinterval of the reference interval, like progressive and imperfective aspects, respectively (Deo 2009).

Measuring Lexical Diversity for Discourse Analysis in Aphasia: Moving-Average Type-Token Ratio and Word Information Measure.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to compare the utility of two automated indices of lexical diversity, the Moving-Average Type-Token Ratio (MATTR) and the Word Information Measure (WIM), in predicting aphasia diagnosis and responding to differences in severity and aphasia subtype. Method Transcripts of a single discourse task were analyzed for 478 speakers, 225 of whom had aphasia per an aphasia battery. We calculated the MATTR and the WIM for each participant. We compared the group means among speakers with aphasia, neurotypical controls, and left-hemisphere stroke survivors with mild aphasia not detected by an aphasia battery. We examined whether each measure distinguished levels of aphasia severity and subtypes of aphasia. We used each measure to classify aphasia versus neurotypical control and compared the areas under the curve. Results The WIM and the MATTR differentiated among people with aphasia, neurotypical controls, and people with mild aphasia. Both measures demonstrated moderately high predictive accuracy in classifying aphasia. The WIM demonstrated greater sensitivity to aphasia severity and subtype compared to the MATTR. Conclusions The WIM and the MATTR are promising measures that quantify lexical diversity in different and complementary ways. The WIM may be more useful for quantifying the effect of treatment or disease progression, whereas the MATTR may be more useful for discriminating discourse produced by people with very mild aphasia from discourse produced by neurotypical controls. Further validation is required.

AN ANALYSIS ON THE DIFFICULTIES LEVEL OF THREE ONLINE WRITTEN TEXTS

This research aims to elaborate the difficulty levels of three different texts that bring the same topic. This research is a discourse analysis which was done by analyzing the lexical density, nominalization, and the finiteness of the texts. The three texts that have been analyzed were taken online from Wikipedia and two personal blogs for English research. The results show that the first text can be taken as the most complex text for high level readers, the second text for the intermediate level readers, and the third text for the elementary or low level readers. In terms of lexical density, the first text gains very high percentage which is up to 60%, this shows that the text is the most informative of all. Whereas, the second text and the third text’s lexical density are both 50%, which indicates that there are lack of contents in them. Regarding to nominalization, the first text is still on the highest level with 12 nominalizations, the second text is on the intermediate level with 10 nominalizations, and the third text is on the lowest level, without any nominalization. The last is from the finiteness side. The first text has the lowest number of finiteness; the second text has the second highest number of finites, whereas the third text has the highest number of finites of all. This is the result of the highest number of lexical density and nominalization of the first text that decreases the frequency of sentences in it. The results of this research can be useful for online readers to decide what kind of reading materials which are suitable for their English levels.

Understanding Tourism Information Sources: Textual Communication, Efficiency, and Information Gaps

This study compares the contents of different online tourism information sources. In addition to developing a quantitative linguistic framework for comparing heterogeneous tourism information sources, a case study of the city of Barcelona in Chinese sources is presented. To understand the structural characteristics of textual communication, efficiency, and information gaps, this research examines texts not only from the websites of the Barcelona Tourism Office (local DMO) and a set of Mainland Chinese travel agencies, but also from Chinese online travel guidebooks and Chinese travel blogs. The findings reveal that the local DMO website texts are, overall, lower in lexical density and keyword density while higher in entropy. Chinese travel agency texts have lower entropy values while keyword and lexical densities are higher. Travel blogs are the most diverse and richest sources. The results explain the easiness of comprehension as well as the concentration, distribution, and repetition of information among the different sources. The findings also identify descriptive– subjective and procedural–propositional knowledge as the main semantic dimensions that affect the information gaps. Lastly, theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.