Defining and measuring the vocabulary gap in school-age speakers of English

The project will adapt Swansea's vocabulary size tests to measure the vocabulary size of young learners in Grange Junior School. It will measure the variation in scores which underlies variation in educational performance, and identify lexical items that distinguish high performing learners from low performing learners.

It will use OUP's Learner Corpus, and changes in lexical sophistication, to examine whether lexical knowledge has diminished over the last 20 years. If the number and range of words used by children, especially infrequent words, is diminishing over time then this will support the hypothesis that overall vocabulary knowledge is also diminishing.