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Finding an appropriate lexical diversity measurement for a small-sized corpus and its application to a comparative study of L2 learners’ writings

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Abstract

The present study investigates four kinds of lexical diversity measurement and a computational experiment with corpus processing and statistical test has been conducted to find out the most effective lexical diversity measurement in evaluating a small-sized corpus of 350 ~ 550 words. The results show that the D-estimate is the most appropriate among the four lexical diversity measurements which were compared in this research. Also the D-estimate showed more stable results than other measurements when the number of words varied between texts. The D-estimate was applied to measure the morphological and grammatical diversities of L2 learners of the Korean language, and conduct a statistical test on whether the mother tongues of L2 learners affect the degree of acquisition of grammatical morphemes. The test shows that the native languages of L2 learners learning Korean did not seem to have a significant impact.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Korean Language and Literature, Mokpo National University, 1666 Youngsan-ro, Cheonggye-myeon, Muan-gun, Jeonnam, 534-729, South Korea

    Woonho Choi

  2. Humanitas College, Kyung Hee University, 1 Hoegi-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 130-701, South Korea

    HwaYoung Jeong

Authors
  1. Woonho Choi
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  2. HwaYoung Jeong
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Correspondence to HwaYoung Jeong.

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Choi, W., Jeong, H. Finding an appropriate lexical diversity measurement for a small-sized corpus and its application to a comparative study of L2 learners’ writings. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 13015–13022 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2529-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2529-1

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