Scott Jarvis

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Linguistics

Many studies have investigated the linguistic characteristics of television and have found important differences between categories of TV programs. Yet, little is known specifically about the lexical profiles of different genres of television discourse. The present study sought to address this gap by exploring the lexical diversity of 714 episodes...

The Miranda rights guard against self-incrimination and guarantee access to legal counsel (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). Individuals may waive these rights if they do so knowingly, and this requires them to comprehend their rights. Many L1 English speakers do not adequately understand the Miranda warning, and the situation is even worse for L2 speaker...

Cross-cultural psychology research has consistently shown that East Asians tend to display a holistic attentional bias and attend to the background context while Westerners show a tendency to attend to focal objects in relative isolation from their context. The present study sought to expand ongoing research on motion event construal by investigati...

This study tests three measures of lexical diversity (LD), each using five operationalizations of word types. The measures include MTLD (measure of textual lexical diversity), MTLD-W (moving average MTLD with wrap-around measurement), and MATTR (moving average type-token ratio). Each of these measures is tested with types operationalized as orthogr...

Indices of lexical diversity have been used to estimate the size of a writer’s vocabulary and/or a writer’s lexical proficiency for some time. One issue with many commonly used indices of lexical diversity (e.g., TTR and index) is that they vary as a function of text length. Accordingly, much research has been devoted to the development of indices...

The purpose of the Miranda rights in the USA is to ensure that suspects know their fundamental rights under the law, yet even native speakers of English do not always understand their rights (Rogers et al., 2010, 2011). To evaluate their understanding, Grisso (1998) developed Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI), normed with native speak...

This paper reports the results of two studies involving native language identification (NLI) by human judges (see Jarvis, 2012; Malmasi, Tetreault, & Dras, 2015; Odin, 1996). The first study includes six Finnish speakers who were asked to read a set of essays written in English and decide as quickly as possible whether each text was written by a Fi...

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan leksikaalisen diversiteetin eli tekstin sanastollisen monimuotoisuuden rakentumista. Tavoitteena on esitellä leksikaalisen diversiteetin tutkimuksen metodiikkaa ja osoittaa sen potentiaali kielitaidon arvioinnin välineenä. Tutkimuksessa selvitetään, kuinka yksilöllisiä arvioijien käsitykset tietyn tekstin sanastollisesta...

This article examines the construct of lexical diversity while focusing on research methodology and the potential for lexical diversity to be used as an index of language proficiency. The study gives attention to questions of inter-rater reliability, the effects of texts' lexical characteristics on raters' lexical diversity ratings, and which set o...

Within higher education, it is often believed that the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) will provide domestic students with the language skills that will enable them to be more competitive in their future professional pursuits. However, research into language learning and EMI at the university level is very scarce. This study examined e...

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct val...

The study examined granularity of lexical partitioning of the blue area in speakers of English, which encodes the term blue ; Russian, which encodes two terms , sinij [dark/navy blue] and goluboj [light/sky blue]; and Ukrainian, which encodes the terms synij [dark/navy blue] and blakytnyj and golubyj [light/sky blue]. Five groups of participants to...

This article clarifies the purposes of research on conceptual transfer by defining it as cross-linguistic influence in the expression and interpretation of conceptual meaning and by discussing what conceptual meaning entails and how conceptual meaning and conceptual transfer relate to the pursuits of linguistic relativity research, on the one hand,...

This chapter provides an overview of existing research into the influence of previously learned languages on the learning and use of an additional language. This type of influence is explored from the perspectives of two separate but related types of effects: (1) the effects of simply knowing more than one language (whatever languages they may be)...

We review empirical studies and theoretical models on the role of WM in interpreting, emphasizing the importance of research design, specially regarding participant selection and types of WM tasks employed. Possible future research directions are discussed, such as research on WM in consecutive interpreting, coordination in simultaneous interpretin...

Native language identification (NLI) is the task of automatically identifying the first language (L1) of a language user on the basis of the person's production of the target language. This research pursuit is guided by the assumption that a person's L1 background can be inferred from how frequently he or she makes use of certain features of the ta...

This paper presents an investigation of lexical first language (L1) attrition, asking how a decrease in lexical accessibility manifests itself in long-term residents in a second language (L2) environment. We question the measures typically used in attrition studies (formal tasks and type-token ratios) and argue for an in-depth analysis of free spok...

This chapter explores issues related to the modeling and measurement of lexical diversity in the language use of foreign language (L2) classroom learners. It provides a brief but informative overview of the field's historical and current understanding of the relationship between lexical production, on the one hand, and vocabulary knowledge, languag...

The range, variety, or diversity of words found in learners’ language use is believed to reflect the complexity of their vocabulary knowledge as well as the level of their language proficiency. Many indices of lexical diversity have been proposed, most of which involve statistical relationships between types and tokens, and which ultimately reflect...

Crosslinguistic influence is the often preferred term for a phenomenon more commonly known as transfer, which is the influence of one language on another, as witnessed in the language use (both comprehension and production) and other language-related behavior (e.g., categorization, gesturing, similarity and typicality judgments, reaction times) of...

Terence Odlin, PhD, is a well-known and respected American linguist who holds emeritus status in the Department of English at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Recent work has pointed to the need for a detection-based approach to transfer capable of discovering elusive crosslinguistic effects through the use of human judges and computer classifiers that can learn to predict learners' language backgrounds based on their patterns of language use. This book addresses that need. It details the nature of the d...

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nüse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1 Spanish...

Research on the relationship between language and cognition in bilinguals has often focused on general effects that are common to bilinguals of all language backgrounds, such as the positive effects of bilingualism in various areas of cognitive development (e.g., Bialystok, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). However, there are also language-specific eff...

The investigation of natural language processing in the field of Applied Linguistics is pursued with both theoretical and practical aims, such as arriving at a clearer understanding of the nature of language knowledge, the rules that govern its use, how it is acquired, how unique it is to individual speakers, and how it can best be taught to learne...

The authors present a model of lexical proficiency based on lexical indices related to vocabulary size, depth of lexical knowledge, and accessibility to core lexical items. The lexical indices used in this study come from the computational tool Coh-Metrix and include word length scores, lexical diversity values, word frequency counts, hypernymy val...

This paper offers a number of refinements to Jarvis's (2000) methodological framework for investigating cross-linguistic effects. According to the original framework, there are three potential consequences of cross-linguistic effects, and any compelling argument for or against the presence of such effects must be based on a consideration of all thr...

The main purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the approach to lexical diversity assessment known as the measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD). The index for this approach is calculated as the mean length of word strings that maintain a criterion level of lexical variation. To validate the MTLD approach, we compared it against...

The authors compare the frequency of negotiations for meaning in a natural spoken corpus to a variety of cohesive devices. The study demonstrates that a lack of cohesive devices in non-native speaker (NNS) discourse correlates to negotiations for meaning. The data comes from a year-long longitudinal study of six beginning NNSs and comprised 99 tran...

Actual, Perceived, and Assumed SimilaritiesTypes of Cross-Linguistic Similarity RelationshipsItem Transfer and System Transfer in Comprehension, Learning, and ProductionImplications for TeachingReferencesFurther Reading

AGE AND THE RATE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING. MuñozCarmen (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xi + 283. - Volume 31 Issue 3 - Scott Jarvis

AGE IN L2 ACQUISITION AND TEACHING.Christián Abello-Contesse, Rubén Chacón-Beltrán, M. Dolores López-Jiménez, and M. Mar Torreblanca-López (Eds.). Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Pp. 220. $45.95 paper. This volume deals with issues related to the effects of age in foreign language learning, immersion programs, and situations in which parents are trying to...

Laura Sanchez is a lecturer at the University of Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches courses on descriptive grammar and applied linguistics. She is also a member of the Barcelona Age Factor project and conducts research on crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of L4 English by EFL Spanish/Catalan learners with L3 German.

A reliable index of lexical diversity (LD) has remained stubbornly elusive for over 60 years. Meanwhile, researchers in fields as varied as stylistics, neuropathology, language acquisition, and even forensics continue to use flawed LD indices - often ignorant that their results are questionable and in some cases potentially dangerous. Recently, an...

This paper clarifies the meaning and scope of the Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis, explores its historical roots, and shows how it relates to but also dif- fers from the Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis and the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Most importantly, the present paper attempts to outline the theoret- ical underpinnings of the Conceptual...

A cogent, freshly written synthesis of new and classic work on crosslinguistic influence, or language transfer, this book is an authoritative account of transfer in second-language learning and its consequences for language and thought. It covers transfer in both production and comprehension, and discusses the distinction between semantic and conce...

With a Finnish-speaking majority and a Swedish-speaking minority, Finland offers a striking contrast in the kinds of cross-linguistic influence that can occur in the acquisition of English in a multilingual setting. While much previous research has looked at the differences between Finnish and Swedish influences, our study compares Swedish influenc...

Recent research has come a long way in describing the linguistic features of large samples of written texts, although a satisfactory description of L2 writing remains problematic. Even when variables such as proficiency, language background, topic, and audience have been controlled, straightforward predictive relationships between linguistic variab...

Much of the research on L2 article acquisition has investigated the effects of semantic, syntactic, and discourse universals on the sys- tematicity and variability of learners' article use. The present paper looks at systematicity from the combined perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity (e.g., Givon, 1983) that...

Numerous conflicting claims exist concerning the nature of L1 influence. This article argues that much of the confusion could be eliminated if a unified framework were established for this area of inquiry. Such a framework would minimally require transfer studies to consider at least 3 potential effects of L1 influence: (a) intra-L1-group similarit...

FINNS AS LEARNERS OF ENGLISH: THREE STUDIES. SajavaaraKari and TakalaSauli (Eds.). Jyväskylä, Finland: Department of English, University of Jyväskylä, 1993. Pp. v + 211. - Volume 16 Issue 4 - Scott Jarvis

It is proposed that because (1) adult learners of English as a Second Language face great challenges in communicating with native English speakers; and (2) native English-speakers can learn strategies to compensate for some of these difficulties, there is a need for instruction in these strategies and skills for Americans in international business....