This essay studies the written performance of 43 Swedish junior high school students. Relative clauses, prepositional usage and subject-verb agreement are studied and analysed in order to see what and how many errors the students make and then finally to see if there is any difference in the performance of boys and girls. Previous research in the area has shown an advantage in favour of girls and this study confirmed this. Even though the differences were not marked, the girls performed better than the boys in the majority of the cases studied. The data further indicated that there is great variation within the gender groups as well as between them.

Los estudios sobre riqueza léxica con participantes suecos tienen, en su gran mayoría, la L2 inglés como lengua objeto. A día de hoy, no se conocen investigaciones que tengan como lengua objeto el español. Respecto a los participantes, suelen ser estudiantes con un nivel de competencia alto. El presente estudio se centra en la L3 español y estudiantes de nivel bajo e intermedio. En concreto, las muestras de lengua analizadas son narrativas escritas por 180 estudiantes suecos de bachillerato, elicitadas a través de una serie de viñetas. De acuerdo con las dos preguntas de investigación, este trabajo tiene como objetivo principal arrojar luz sobre la relación entre diversidad léxica y competencia léxica y morfosintáctica en la L3 español. En segundo lugar, se comparan varias medidas de diversidad léxica en busca de una medida apta para discriminar de una manera fiable entre diferentes niveles de competencia en la lengua meta. Los datos demuestran un efecto tangible del nivel de competencia sobre la diversidad léxica, aunque de las comparaciones que resultan ser estadísticamente significativas se manifiesta una fuerte influencia del factor edad. Respecto a las medidas, el Índice de Guiraud y el indicador Carroll son las únicas que discriminan significativamente entre los participantes más jóvenes, y también resultan idóneas a discriminar en dos comparaciones del grupo más mayor. Por consiguiente, se consideran las medidas más fiables entre las que se han utilizado en el estudio. Sin embargo, los resultados estadísticos de las dos medidas coinciden a tal punto que se puede afirmar que se trata de dos versiones de la misma medida, aunque muestran valores numéricos diferentes. / Research on lexical richness with Swedish subjects have mostly English as a target language. At the present time, we cannot find investigations having Spanish as a target language. Subjects are usually university students with high proficiency. This study focuses on Spanish as a third language and students with low/intermediate proficiency. Language samples consist of 180 narratives written by Swedish high-school students with a low/intermediate average proficiency in Spanish. The samples have been elicited by means of pictures. According to the two research questions, the main aim of the present study is investigating the relationship between lexical diversity and lexical and morphosyntactic proficiency in Spanish as a third language. Secondly, we compare several measures of lexical diversity searching for results that can reliably discriminate between different proficiency levels in Spanish. The data show a clear effect of proficiency on lexical diversity, even though statistically significant comparisons also point out the influence of the age factor. Regarding the measures, Guiraud’s Index and Carroll’s indicator are the only ones that significantly discriminate among younger participants. They have also proved to be suitable for discriminating comparisons within the older participants’ group. Nevertheless, the statistical results of these two measures correspond to such a high degree that we can consider them as two versions of the same measure, even if they provide different numerical values.