Measuring the development of lexical richness of L2 Spanish: A longitudinal learner corpus study

Abstract Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous on the development vocabulary by investigating features Spanish learners a 21-month period, using LANGSNAP corpus. Multiple indices used in studies were including diversity, word frequency, concreteness, bigram strength association. Linear mixed-effects models run examine changes time. The results suggest although some (e.g., frequency) see meaningful change time, others T score) may be indicative oral development.