Passive vocabulary size and speed of meaning recognition: are they related?
By B. Laufer, Paul Nation. 2020
62 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines the relationship between fluency and vocabulary size, and also between fluency and word frequency level. Fluency was operationalised as the time learners need to recognize meanings of words sampled from different frequency levels. It was measured by a computerised vocabulary recognition speed test (VORST). The test was given to 488 native and non-native speakers who were divided by vocabulary size into four groups. The four groups were compared on speed of response to the 3000 level and University Word List (UWL) words. Speed was also correlated with vocabulary size. Additionally, response times to different frequency levels were compared for each subject. Results suggest that speed of retrieval is moderately related to vocabulary size and word frequency. Non-native speakers’ increase in speed lags behind increase in vocabulary size. Non-native speakers also respond more slowly to less frequent words. Responses of native speakers, on the other hand, are more homogeneous across subjects and across vocabulary frequencies. Speed of retrieval cannot be fully predicted from vocabulary knowledge and therefore speed tests should supplement tests of vocabulary size and depth.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f4b41b1df546d224daeb962b78161a97dfdfb51
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In Artificial Intelligence
- N. Schmitt
- B. Laufer
- E. Peters
- Diane Schmitt
- Stuart Webb
- Geke C. Ravenhorst-Kalovski
- A. Pellicer‐Sánchez
- Lars Stenius Stæhr
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- N. Schmitt
- E. Peters
- Stuart Webb
- Diane Schmitt
- B. Laufer
- Geke C. Ravenhorst-Kalovski
- Lars Stenius Stæhr
- A. Pellicer‐Sánchez
Citations in the corpus
- A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary teaching1 (2012, background): “Laufer & Nation (2001) looked at the relationship between vocabulary size on the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham 2001), and the speed at which learners could answer items on that test.”
- Lexical threshold revisited: Lexical text coverage, learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension (2010, background): “Laufer and Nation (2001) explored the relationship between vocabulary size and speed of decoding word meaning and found that speed on a particular word frequency level increased only when learners' vocabulary size progressed far beyond that level.”
- Size and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge: What the Research Shows (2014, methodology): “Laufer and Nation (2001) used a modified computerized VLT format, but showing only one stem at a time on a screen, instead of three.”