Université de Fribourg

Predicting perceptions of the lexical richness of short French, German, and Portuguese texts using text-based indices

Vanhove, Jan ; Bonvin, Audrey ; Lambelet, Amelia ; Berthele, Raphael

In: Journal of Writing Research, 2019, vol. 10, no. 3, p. 499-525

We investigated how well readers’ perceptions of the lexical richness of short texts can be predicted on the basis of automatically computable indices of the texts’ lexical properties. 3,060 French, German and Portuguese texts (between 9 and 284 words long) written by 8- to 10-year-olds were rated for their lexical richness by between 3 and 18 uninstructed raters, and over 150 indices were...