Capturing the Diversity in Lexical Diversity.

By Scott Jarvis. 2013

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The range, variety, or diversity of words found in learners’ language use is believed to reflect the complexity of their vocabulary knowledge as well as the level of their language proficiency. Many indices of lexical diversity have been proposed, most of which involve statistical relationships between types and tokens, and which ultimately reflect the rate of word repetition. These indices have generally been validated in accordance with how well they overcome sample-size effects and/or how well they predict language knowledge or behavior, rather than in accordance with how well they actually measure the construct of lexical diversity. In this article, I review developments that have taken place in lexical diversity research, and also describe obstacles that have prevented it from advancing further. I compare these developments with parallel research on biodiversity in the field of ecology, and show what language researchers can learn from ecology regarding the modeling and measurement of diversity as a multidimensional construct of compositional complexity.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2ea48a8fa68496335d59c1dfc223db992c3879b

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Cultural Studies

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Lexical Sophistication as a Multidimensional Phenomenon: Relations to Second Language Lexical Proficiency, Development, and Writing Quality (2018, unknown): “Lexical richness is operationalized into various measures—including, but not limited to, lexical sophistication and lexical diversity (Jarvis, 2013).”
Assessing the Validity of Lexical Diversity Indices Using Direct Judgements (2020, methodology): “…correlation values were relatively high, much higher correlations would be expected if lexical variety (as measured by these indices) were fully representative of the construct of lexical diversity indicating that a multidimensional model of lexical diversity may be needed (Jarvis (2013a, 2013b).”