Lexical Diversity in Multilingual Young Learners’ Texts

In general, multilingual children have lower vocabulary competence than monolingual children when considering only one language (but more when considering all languages). If sufficient input is provided in all languages, however, the Complementarity Principle (Grosjean 2016) hypothesizes equivalent vocabulary for monolinguals and multilinguals speaking the same language. It is our objective to evaluate the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual young learners of German (grade 6-8) in South Tyrol who have been studying together for several years and should, according to the Complementarity Principle, have a comparable vocabulary. For the analysis of student texts, we will use three sets of texts taken from the LEONIDE corpus (Glaznieks et al., 2022). Due to the fact that the texts of the students are not equal, we will utilize the Lexical Diversity Measure to compare the vocabulary of each student. It has been shown that learner characteristics profoundly influence measures of lexical diversity, range, and sophistication (e.g., Meurers 2015). Considering school-related topics, we expect that the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual learners after a sufficient period of schooling is equally large. Moreover, we hope to gain knowledge about which measures of lexical diversity are more useful for (short) student texts. Consequently, lexical diversity measures would likely be useful tools for comparing the vocabulary of individual texts, and the expected results would have important implications for the judgement of the vocabulary of multilingual individuals.