Lexical Diversity and Language Development: Quantification and Assessment - Softcover

Malvern, David D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1403902321 ISBN 13: 9781403902320

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Synopsis

Vocabulary richness, including lexical diversity and use of rare words, has an important role in assessing proficiency, diagnosing progress and testing theory in the study of language development. This book reviews different methods for quantifying how vo

About this title

About the Author

DAVID D. MALVERN is Professor of Education, University of Reading, UK. He has been Research Officer at the Royal Society, Visiting Professor Department of Educational Psychology, McGill University, and European Union and British Council Consultant.

BRIAN J. RICHARDS is Professor of Education, University of Reading, UK, and for seventeen years was an associate editor of the Journal of Child Language

NGONI CHIPERE is Lecturer in Language Arts, University of the West Indies in Barbados, and author of Understanding Complex Sentences: Native Speaker Variation in Syntactic Competence published by Palgrave in 2004.

PILAR DURÁN gained a PhD at Boston University and was Research Officer, University of Reading, UK, before becoming Business Development Manager at Eurobios.

Review

'This book represents a major contribution to the study of both lexical diversity and language development... [and] provides the most comprehensive and compelling study available to date of vocabulary measurement, including type-token ratios, number of different words, and word length. The innovative, empirically validated, and user-friendly measure of lexical diversity (VOCD - or simply D) that it proposes is based on deep understanding of mathematical models combined with rich background in language acquisition and language assessment. The culmination of fifteen years of cooperative research between David Malvern, Brian Richards, and their co-authors at the University of Reading, this study represents the best of inter-disciplinary research. In style, the book is both erudite and readable. It should be an invaluable source of reference for scholars and graduate-level students in general and psycho-linguistics, in first and second language acquisition, language education, and language pathology.' - Ruth A. Berman, Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University

'David Malvern and his co-authors have developed a new and very promising approach to the study of lexical diversity and language development. Their statistical method is far more sophisticated than anything we have had in the past. This book will be of great interest to the developmental psycholinguistic community.' - Professor Jean Berko Gleason, Department of Psychology, Boston University

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1403902321
• ISBN 13: 9781403902320
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 269