The Measurement of Vocabulary Difficulty

Tharp, James B.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.1939.tb02893.x

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…For instance, Flesch claimed his formula was suitable for all adults, although he trained it on the McCall & Crabbs lessons, intended for schoolchildren. However, some researchers began fairly early on to design specialized formulas, either for specific populations, such as young children (Spache 1953;Harris & Jacobson 1973), second language learners (Tharp 1939), soldiers (Kincaid & al. 1975), or for specific types of texts, such as standardized tests (Forbes & Cottle 1953), scientific texts (Jacobson 1965), or technical documents (Hull 1979, cited by Klare 1984.…”

Section: Specializing the Formulasmentioning

confidence: 99%

When readability meets computational linguistics: a new paradigm in readability

Thomas¹

2015

Revue Française De Linguistique Appliquée

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Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Publications linguistiques. © Publications linguistiques. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

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Section: Specializing the Formulasmentioning

confidence: 99%

When readability meets computational linguistics: a new paradigm in readability

Thomas¹

2015

Revue Française De Linguistique Appliquée

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“…In L2 settings, on the contrary, these words can facilitate the comprehension for language learners with a romance language background due to their cognateness. Already, Tharp (1939) criticizes that pure frequency counts "ignore the lack of burden of 'gift' words" such as cognates. Ferreira de Souza (2003) studies how cognates contribute to reading comprehension and finds a positive effect for the tasks of skimming and free written recall.…”

Section: Cognatenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Readability for foreign language learning

Beinborn

Zesch

Gurevych

2014

ITL

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In this paper, we analyse the differences between L1 acquisition and L2 learning and identify four main aspects: input quality and quantity, mapping processes, cross-lingual influence, and reading experience. As a consequence of these differences, we conclude that L1 readability measures cannot be directly mapped to L2 readability. We propose to calculate L2 readability for various dimensions and for smaller units. It is particularly important to account for the cross-lingual influence from the learner’s L1 and other previously acquired languages and for the learner’s higher experience in reading.In our analysis, we focus on lexical readability as it has been found to be the most influential dimension for L2 reading comprehension. We discuss the features frequency, lexical variation, concreteness, polysemy, and context specificity and analyse their impact on L2 readability. As a new feature specific to L2 readability, we propose the cognateness of words with words in languages the learner already knows. A pilot study confirms our assumption that learners can deduce the meaning of new words by their cognateness to other languages.

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“…The need to account for this semasiological variation when estimating word difficulty can be traced as far back as to Tharp (1939). Indeed, Tharp highlighted the drawbacks of defining word difficulty estimates by tallying the frequency of occurrence of similar word forms that are inherently polysemous.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

NT2Lex: A CEFR-Graded Lexical Resource for Dutch as a Foreign Language Linked to Open Dutch WordNet

Tack

Thomas²,

Desmet³

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP For Building Educational Applications

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In this paper, we introduce NT2Lex, a novel lexical resource for Dutch as a foreign language (NT2) which includes frequency distributions of 17,743 words and expressions attested in expert-written textbook texts and readers graded along the scale of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). In essence, the lexicon informs us about what kind of vocabulary should be understood when reading Dutch as a non-native reader at a particular proficiency level.The main novelty of the resource with respect to the previously developed CEFR-graded lexicons concerns the introduction of corpusbased evidence for L2 word sense complexity through the linkage to Open Dutch WordNet (Postma et al., 2016). The resource thus contains, on top of the lemmatised and part-ofspeech tagged lexical entries, a total of 11,999 unique word senses and 8,934 distinct synsets.

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The Measurement of Vocabulary Difficulty

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

When readability meets computational linguistics: a new paradigm in readability

When readability meets computational linguistics: a new paradigm in readability

Readability for foreign language learning

NT2Lex: A CEFR-Graded Lexical Resource for Dutch as a Foreign Language Linked to Open Dutch WordNet

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