Lexical density in school written texts

Abstract

This article presents a correlational study between lexical density and school progression in texts written by school age children and adolescents, monolingual speakers of European Portuguese. The measure used to assess lexical density is the ratio of lexical words to the total number of words (global density), as proposed by Ure (1971). This measure is complemented by the ratio of specific word classes (name, verb, adjective and adverb) to the total number of words. Using IMS Open Corpus Workbench tool, this measures was extracted from a quasi-longitudinal corpus consisting of 244 texts of narrative (n = 122) and argumentative (n = 122) register, written by students in the 5^th (n = 26), the 7^th (n = 46) and 10^th (n = 50) year of the Portuguese basic schooling system. The results show that there are no correlations between global lexical density and school progression in both registers. Regarding specific lexical density, it was found that, in one hand, there is a positive correlation between nominal density and progression and, on the other hand, there is a negative correlation between verbal density and progression. This work aims to contribute to a more detailed understanding of the lexical development of children and adolescents written language across school progression.