TY - JOUR
T1 - Computational assessment of lexical differences in L1 and L2 writing
AU - Crossley, Scott A.
AU - McNamara, Danielle S.
N1 - Funding Information:
The research was supported in part by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES R3056020018-02 and R305A080589). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IES. The authors are indebted to Dr. Philip McCarthy of the Institute for Intelligent Systems for his assistance with the statistical analyses reported in this paper.
PY - 2009/6
Y1 - 2009/6
N2 - The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conceptual analysis, and a statistical method known as discriminant function analysis. Results show that L1 and L2 written texts vary in several dimensions related to the writer's use of lexical choices. These dimensions correlate to lexical depth of knowledge, variation, and sophistication. These findings, together with the relevance of the new computational tools for the text analysis used in the study, are discussed.
AB - The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conceptual analysis, and a statistical method known as discriminant function analysis. Results show that L1 and L2 written texts vary in several dimensions related to the writer's use of lexical choices. These dimensions correlate to lexical depth of knowledge, variation, and sophistication. These findings, together with the relevance of the new computational tools for the text analysis used in the study, are discussed.
KW - Cohesion
KW - Computational linguistics
KW - Corpus linguistics
KW - Lexical networks
KW - Lexical proficiency
KW - Second language writing
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jslw.2009.02.002
DO - 10.1016/j.jslw.2009.02.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:67349241371
SN - 1060-3743
VL - 18
SP - 119
EP - 135
JO - Journal of Second Language Writing
JF - Journal of Second Language Writing
IS - 2
ER -