rickl's Mcnamara [4 articles]

Abstract

This study investigated second language (L2) lexical development in the spontaneous speech of six adult, L2 English learners in a 1-year longitudinal study. One important aspect of lexical development is lexical organization and depth of knowledge. Hypernymic relations, the hierarchical relationships among related words that vary in relation to their semantic specificity (e.g., Golden Retriever vs. dog vs. animal), are an important indicator of both lexical organization and depth of knowledge. Thus, this study used hypernymy values from the WordNet database ...

Abstract

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 ...

Abstract

This paper follows up on the work of Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy & McNamara (2007), who conducted an exploratory study of the linguistic differences of simplified and authentic texts found in beginner level English as a Second Language (ESL) textbooks using the computational tool Coh-Metrix. The purpose of this study is to provide a more comprehensive study of second language (L2) reading texts than that provided by Crossley et al. (2007) by investigating the differences between the linguistic structures of a larger ...