Peer-reviewed research
Lexical Development in L2 English Learners' Speeches and Writings
Shin'ichiro Ishikawa, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 198 (2015) 202-210, 2015 · DOI 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.07.437
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- An open-access journal article on lexical density, the share of content words in a text, in the speeches and essays of second-language English learners. Its background section summarizes earlier speech and writing figures from Ure (1971) and Eggins (1994).
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed, but its own data are from L2 learners, so the speech and writing figures we cite are background that the paper reports from older work. We did not see Ure (1971) or Eggins (1994) directly, so treat those figures as secondhand.
Facts taken from this source
- Eggins (1994), as cited by Ishikawa (2015), found in a corpus analysis that lexical density was 33 percent in speech and 42 percent in writing.
“Eggins (1994) conducted a corpus analysis and determined that lexical density was 33% and ... 42% in speeches and writings respectively” (Introduction, lexical density background)
- Ure (1971), as cited by Ishikawa (2015), put the lexical density of speech below 40 percent and that of writing above it.
“Ure (1971) asserts that lexical density is less than and higher than 40% for speeches and writings respectively” (Introduction, lexical density background)