What do wordlists tell us? —Adding the dimensions of sense and difficulty levels into the existing English wordlists
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Lin, Yi-hsin
Abstract
This study aims to examine the existing English wordlists used in Taiwan and abroad, trying to make comparison between them and exploring the nature of basic words from a conceptual perspective. Basic words are mapped to WordNet semantic hierarchy to see their semantic distance from the root node, and the senses of basic words in the WordNet are also extracted. Furthermore, to put local English wordlists into application, this study examines the text coverage of GEPT wordlist, Vocabulary 7000, BNC lists and NGSL&NAWL on GEPT reading comprehension tests (55 articles), and attempts to examine the word distribution of given articles. The results find that there are 1299 words appearing in every wordlist selected. It is also discovered that basic words tend to have more senses in the English WordNet. The average sense number of basic verbs is up to seven, while basic nouns and adjectives have five senses on average. Furthermore, the distances between basic verbs and their root nodes are lower than those of advanced verbs, and this suggests that basic verbs tend to be more general in meaning. On the contrary, basic nouns do not share the same pattern as basic verbs do; the possible reason may be that when the meanings of nouns become either too general or too specific, they become more unfamiliar to learners. Finally, this study analyzes the coverage of different lists on GEPT reading comprehension tests, examining the word distribution. The coverage of all the lists reaches around 90%, and according to statistical analysis, all the four lists perform quite the same. It is also discovered that the average sense number of elementary level articles is higher than that of intermediate levels. When the difficulty of the articles increases, the average sense number then decreases. Finally, an online interface was built to help users analyze word distribution of different lists. A new verb list is also provided according to the sense numbers and semantic distances. The findings of the study suggest that sense numbers and semantic distance may be taken into consideration in defining word basicness. In addition, learners and teachers should be aware of the number of senses in acquiring basic words, and also the semantic relationship between them by the help of WordNet. Further research may explore deeper into the other semantic relations between basic words.
Subjects
wordlists
basic words
WordNet
coverage
semantic hierarchy
Type
thesis
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