This study explores the construct of lexical sophistication and its applications for measuring second language lexical and speaking proficiency. In doing so, the study introduces the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of LExical Sophistication (TAALES), which calculates text scores for 135 classic and newly developed lexical indices related to word frequency, range, bigram and trigram frequency, a...

This paper presents work on how we can link word lists derived from learner corpora to target proficiency levels for lexical complexity analysis. The word lists present frequency distributions over different proficiency levels. We present a mapping approach which takes these distributions and maps each word to a single proficiency level. We are also investigating how we can evaluate the mapping...

The present study aimed to shed light upon the differences of social practice of Persian translations of The Girl You Left Behind written by Jojo Moyes (2012) with original text in English based on Fairclough's (1995) model. In this regard, through a careful analysis of the source and target texts, English social prac- tice instances were selected along with their Persian equivalents as the cor...

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 Sp...

What are the processes underlying the judgments of translation? And what is the role of language proficiency? This study addresses these questions by examining how Chinese-English bilinguals evaluate poetry translations. Participants were shown haikus in Chinese and the corresponding English translations and were asked to rate the translation quality. The English translations ranged from litera...

This paper presents work on how we can link word lists derived from learner corpora to target proficiency levels for lexical complexity analysis. The word lists present frequency distributions over different proficiency levels. We present a mapping approach which takes these distributions and maps each word to a single proficiency level. We are also investigating how we can evaluate the mapping...

PURPOSE To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects of prosody. A second goal was to a...

Prosodic features are important for the intelligibility and proficiency of stress-timed languages such as English and Arabic. Producing the appropriate lexical stress is challenging for second language (L2) learners, in particular, those whose first language (L1) is a syllable-timed language such as Spanish, French, etc. In this paper we introduce a method for automatic classification of lexica...