This study investigated the development of knowledge of vocabulary including multiple meanings of words during the school years. Twenty children from each of Grades 2, 5, 8, and 11 were tested for their knowledge of all the meanings of a large random sample of words from an unabridged dictionary (Webster's Third, 1981). Approximately 47% of the words had more than one meaning. Total average estimated vocabulary increased from 17,970 words in Grade 2 to 83,871 words in Grade 11. The estimated number of known derived words increased at the greatest rate throughout the school years. There was evidence that participants may have used morphological problem solving to figure out at least one meaning for 45% of their total vocabulary. Not only did the number of words known increase dramatically through the school years but the total average estimated number of different word meanings known increased also from 28,797 word meanings in Grade 2 to 185,990 word meanings in Grade 11. Three types of meanings were identified according to their relation to their principal meaning (known by the most children): homonyms (share no semantic relationship); conversions (different grammatical part of speech); and metaphorical extensions (share some other semantic relationship). When children demonstrated knowledge of more than one meaning, they were asked to attempt to explain the relation between those two meanings. Even the youngest children in Grade 2 knew a large number of multiple meanings but the ability to express knowledge of a relation between those meanings was uncommon until the later school years. This developing ability can be explained in part by the children???s increasing metalinguistic awareness and general linguistic expressiveness but also by an increasing ability to understand and express metaphorical similarities between lexical concepts, which are common to the metaphorically extended meanings.

No description available.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

For decades, vocabulary size tests have been built upon the idea that if a test-taker knows enough words at a given level of frequency based on a list from corpus, they will also know other words of that approximate frequency as well as all words that are more frequent. However, many vocabulary size tests are based on corpora that are as out-of-date as 70 years old and that may be ill-suited for these tests. Based on these potentially problematic areas, the following research questions were asked. First, to what degree would a vocabulary size test based on a large, contemporary corpus be reliable and valid? Second, would it be more reliable and valid than previously designed vocabulary size tests? Third, do words across, 1,000-word frequency bands vary in their item difficulty? In order to answer these research questions, 403 ESL learners took the Vocabulary of American English Size Test (VAST). This test was based on a words list generated from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This thesis shows that COCA word list might be better suited for measuring vocabulary size than lists used in previous vocabulary size assessments. As a 450-million-word corpus, it far surpasses any corpus used in previously designed vocabulary size tests in terms of size, balance, and representativeness. The vocabulary size test built from the COCA list was both highly valid and highly reliable according to a Rasch-based analysis. Rasch person reliability and separation was calculated to be 0.96 and 4.62, respectively. However, the most significant finding of this thesis is that frequency ranking in a word list is actually not as good of a predictor of item difficulty in a vocabulary size assessment as perhaps researchers had previously assumed. A Pearson correlation between frequency ranking in the COCA list and item difficulty for 501 items taken from the first 5,000 most frequent words was 0.474 (r^2 = 0.225) meaning that frequency rank only accounted for 22.5% of the variability of item difficulty. The correlation decreased greatly when item difficulty was correlated against bands of 1,000 words to a weak r = 0.306, (r^2 = 0.094) meaning that 1,000-word bands of frequency only accounts for 9.4% of the variance. Because frequency is a not a highly accurate predictor of item difficulty, it is important to reconsider how vocabulary size tests are designed.

No description available.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

No description available.