Lexical diversity in an L2 Spanish learner corpus

Abstract

This study examines the impact of two topic-related variables (i.e., valence polarity and everyday-life closeness) on the lexical diversity scores (i.e., MTLD) of learners of L2 Spanish at different proficiency levels. The analysis included 3,045 texts written in response to two pairs of prompts by 1,165 students enrolled in an L2 Spanish program. The first pair of prompts asked learners to narrate an event: prompt 1 focused on a perfect vacation (positive event), while prompt 2 asked participants to tell a terrible story (negative event). The second pair asked to describe a person: prompt 1 required that the subject be famous, thus not close to the writer, whereas prompt 2 required that the subject be special and close to the writer. Results indicate that lexical diversity scores were higher for the texts written about the positive event and the famous subject across all proficiency levels.