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Written Language & Literacy 13:2 (2010), 183–205. doi 10.1075/wll.13.2.01berissn 1387–6732 / e-issn 1570–6001 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiationDevelopmental perspectives

Ruth A. Berman and Bracha NirTel Aviv University, Israel / Haifa University, Israel

The study analyzed text-embedded lexical usage as diagnostic of writing-speech-distinctions in stories and discussions produced in the two modalities by Eng-lish-speaking grade-school children, middle-school pre-adolescents, high-school adolescents, and adults. We assumed that (1) while children master writing as a notational system by age 9 to 10 years, command of written language as a special style of discourse has a long developmental trajectory, and (2) distinct processing constraints and communicative circumstances combine to affect texts produced in the two modalities. Across the board, written texts scored higher than their spoken counterparts produced by the same participants on all five measures that we applied — Word Length, Register, Density, Diversity, and Abstractness — re-flecting a more elevated and carefully monitored style of expression. With regard to development, high school students emerged as distinct from the two younger groups, demonstrating adolescence as a developmental watershed in discourse-embedded lexical usage as in other domains of text construction. When task order (written texts produced before or after spoken ones, respectively) is taken into account, however, a more complex, multi-faceted picture emerges with respect to the variables of age, specific lexical measure, and order effects.

Keywords: writing, speech, later language development, lexicon, register, word length, lexical density, diversity, abstractness

1. Introduction

There is a rich research tradition that considers language in the written compared with spoken modality, initially with mainly pedagogic concern (e.g. Bushnell 1930; Lull 1929), subsequently with more direct linguistic motivations (e.g. De-Vito 1967; Drieman 1962). In recent decades, comparisons of the two modalities have been undertaken from a range of different perspectives, including: corpus

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184 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

linguistics analyses of textual dimensions (e.g. Biber 1986, 2009); functional analy-ses in terms of linguistic complexity (Halliday 1989; Hopper 2001); communica-tively oriented discourse studies (e.g. Chafe 1994; Tannen 1984); psychologically motivated concern with the conceptual and cultural impact of writing and reading (Olson 1994; Tolchinsky 2003); or the nature of the cognitive processes and men-tal representations involved in speaking and writing (Bourdin & Fayol 1994; Cle-land & Pickering 2006). Developmental analyses in this domain have examined writing as a notational system (Gillis & Ravid 2001; Pacton & Fayol 2004), on the one hand, and compared online processes of spoken as against written language output, on the other (e.g. Strömqvist et al. 2004).

The present study both relates to and attempts to go beyond such research. Relying on analyses undertaken in the framework of a large-scale cross-linguistic project, we examined text construction abilities of schoolchildren, adolescents, and university-educated adults in which the same participants produced both nar-rative and expository texts in both the spoken and written modalities (Berman & Verhoeven 2002). Two main assumptions underlie our study: First, that “mastery of written language as a hallmark of literacy” (Jisa 2004a) is a process that extends well beyond grade school and that, connected to this, learning to write is some-thing more than just “learning to express your ideas in an alternative medium to speech” (Strömqvist 2006). Rather, distinct processing constraints combine with the different communicative circumstances associated with the two modalities to exert an important impact on both the form and content of texts produced in writ-ing compared with speech (Berman & Ravid 2008).

We further assume that although children have basic command of writing as a notational system by the middle of grade-school (at age around 9 to 10 years), they have not yet mastered written language “as a special discourse style” (Ravid & Tolchinsky 2002). True, the texts produced by even 9 year olds have been shown to reflect the impact of modality in different languages. For example, the narrative texts written by English- and Hebrew-speaking 9 to 10 year olds contained signifi-cantly more novel, referentially informative material than their oral counterparts (Ravid & Berman 2006). In contrast, the same stories told by these same children orally contained far more ‘ancillary’ material — in the form of false starts, repairs, and procedural discourse markers (like introducing a story by well, okay or end-ing it by and that’s it, or qualifying statements by hedges such as like, just, kinda and intensifiers such as really, terrifically, very). Such usages were typical of the spoken rather than the written narratives of all participants, from the youngest group of 4th-graders on, while the latter used them to much the same amount as the older, adolescent and adult groups in both languages. We explained this find-ing as due to the shared processing effects of organization and retrieval of verbal information in the course of online text output. Consequently, we assume that

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 185

the distinction between online (oral) and offline (written) production of verbal material will have an impact on the text production of both young children and educated adults. However, as we hope to show below, there is a lengthy develop-mental path before speaker-writers manifest a mature sensitivity to the different types and levels of language use appropriate to monologic text production in each of the two modalities.

2. Description of the study

While recognizing the importance of online processing factors in the writing-speech distinction (as demonstrated, for example, by Chafe 1994; Strőmqvist et al. 2004), the present study focuses, rather, on literacy-dependent and schooling-based developments in the writing-speech-distinction in terms of linguistic expres-sion and the deployment of linguistic forms for the encoding of discourse content. To this end, we examined a unique data-base, in which the same participants each produced four texts in two genres (narrative and expository) and two modalities (speech and writing).1 Data in the different languages were elicited by the same procedures from 80 participants, twenty at each of four levels of age and schooling: Grade school children aged 9 to 10 years [henceforth G-IV], Junior high students aged 12 to 13 [J-VII], High schoolers aged 16 to 17 [H-XI], and Adult graduate school university students in their 20s and 30s [Ads]. All participants were shown the same culturally neutral video film depicting various (unresolved) situations of interpersonal conflict and were asked to tell and write a story and to give a talk and write a composition on the topic of ‘problems between people’ (for detailed expla-nation of procedures, see Berman & Katzenberger 2004).2 Text production was balanced for order of genre and modality across two different elicitation sessions as follows: Half the participants (10 in each age group) produced a written and spoken narrative in the first session and an expository essay and talk in the second, while the other half produced expository texts in the first session. Elicitation was further sub-divided between these 10 participants in each age-group, such that half produced their spoken texts before their written and vice versa.3

This original methodology allowed us to control the variables of age and mo-dality as well as genre in a way not often adopted in the research literature (with the notable exception of Scott & Windsor 2000). The English-language corpus an-alyzed below totals 320 texts (4 each from 20 subjects in each of 4 age groups) — ranging in length from less than 10 words and only 1 clause in an oral expository text of a 4th-grader [eG10mesb] to over a thousand words and nearly 200 clauses in the written narrative of a woman university student [eA13fnwc].4 Moreover, these are all ‘authentic’ materials, in the sense that they were unpublished and

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186 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

elicited from ‘naïve’ speaker-writers (the adults were not professional writers or language teachers), without editing or revision on our part.5

Below, we analyze the text-embedded lexicon as diagnostic of distinctions between speech and writing by examining stories and discussions produced by English-speaking schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults in the two modalities. In contrast to the extensive research on the role of the lexicon in early language acquisition (e.g. Clark 1993; Hall & Waxman 2004), the domain has been relatively neglected in psycholinguistically oriented studies of language development be-yond the preschool years. Exceptions include the work of scholars such as Anglin (1993) and Carlisle (2000) for English, Ravid (2004, 2006; Ravid & Levie 2010) for Hebrew, and Strömqvist et al. (2002) for Swedish. Ravid points to the importance of developing what she terms ‘a literate lexicon’, noting that “lexical knowledge is a crucial component of any higher-order cognitive activity, and so is lexical devel-opment for academic achievement across the school years” (2004). In the present context, focus is on text-embedded lexical usage as an important window on lan-guage development beyond the domain of vocabulary knowledge. Thus, child lan-guage researchers have argued for a strong inter-connection between command of the lexicon and grammatical development in the pre-school years (Bates & Good-man 1997; Marchman & Thal 2005). And research has revealed a clear correlation between lexical usage and level of syntactic complexity in a range of different con-structions in (British) English-speaking schoolchildren’s narrative texts (Malvern et al. 2004) and in expository essays written by native-speakers of Californian Eng-lish and Israeli Hebrew by schoolchildren and adolescents in a study conducted in the same framework as the present paper (Berman & Nir 2009).

We applied five different measures to analyze text-based lexical usage — Word Length, Register, Density, Diversity, and Abstractness — by means of the follow-ing procedures. All measures were calculated out of the total number of words per text, so neutralizing the problem of (sometimes extreme) differences in text length across the population. Word Length was counted by number of syllables and proportion of polysyllabic items rather than by number of letters per word, in order to apply similarly across both written and spoken materials as well as, in separate studies, across different languages (Riedemann 1996); Lexical Register was analyzed by comparing the ratio of words of Latinate versus Germanic origin out of total content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives), on the assumption that the former represent a higher, more sophisticated level of language usage and that words from the Germanic stock are more basic and colloquial (Corson 1984, 1995; Quirk 1974). Note that the criterion of Register, in the sense of level of language usage, takes into account the sociolinguistically determined language-particular nature of register distinctions (Ravid & Berman 2009) and, as such, is the only one that was designed specifically for the English-language data-base (Bar-Ilan &

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 187

Berman 2007). Lexical Density was defined by number of content words (N, V, A) out of total words per text (Strömqvist et al. 2002).6 Lexical Diversity was measured by VOCD scores specifying number of different word-types (in fact, word-forms) out of total words per text (as motivated and detailed for English by Malvern et al. 2004). And Lexical Abstractness was measured as the proportion of nouns out of total lexical nouns (i.e. excluding pronouns) ranked at the highest level on an Eng-lish adaptation of a 10-point scale of nominal usage devised by Ravid for a parallel data-base in Hebrew. The principle of ranking nouns as ranging from highly con-crete, imageable, and specific to abstract, infrequent, and/or derivationally com-plex was maintained, but the scale was reduced for present purposes to a 4-place ranking, with the lower levels including (1) concrete objects and specific people (e.g. John, a ball, flowers) and (2) categorical and generic nouns, or names of roles and locations (e.g. a / every teacher, the city, my house, people, things). In contrast, the two higher levels include (3) non-abstract, high-register, low-frequency nouns (e.g. rival, cult) and abstract but more everyday terms (e.g. fight, war), as well as metaphorical extensions of concrete terms (e.g. the path to success, river of time); and (4) abstract, non-imageable nouns (e.g. lack, relationship, existence) — with all and only items ranked at level #4 included in the current analysis. Decisions on where to rate the relevant items on the scale were made by two native English-speaking linguistics majors working in conjunction, and checked with each of the two authors in turn.

The measures we applied thus include three that are accepted in corpus linguis-tics and in educational and sociolinguistic research — word length, lexical diversity, and lexical density — supplemented by two criteria designed specifically for the proj-ect within which the present study is embedded: register, and semantic abstractness.

Application of these measures is illustrated by the texts in (1) and (2), taken from the two extremes of our sample:7 (a) In development, from the youngest and oldest groups — a 4th-grade girl in middle childhood and a woman graduate-level university student; and (b) in text type, from an oral narrative and an expository essay — as the two forms of discourse which studies in different languages and dealing with different facets of the same or similar data-bases have shown to rep-resent two extremes in level of linguistic complexity and formality of usage out of the four text types we elicited on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict (Ber-man 2008; Berman & Ravid 2009; Ravid 2004; Ravid & Berman 2009, Tolchinsky & Rosado 2005).

Consider, first, the text in (1) — an oral personal experience narrative pro-duced by a girl in 4th-grade who had been asked to tell a story about an incident in which she had had ‘problems with people’.8 Content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) are underlined and items that occur more than once are marked in ital-ics. (So-called ‘adverbs’ that can be interpreted as discourse marking intensifiers or

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188 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

hedges are not counted as content words here, e.g. very, highly, extremely or rather, probably, pretty).

(1) Oral narrative of 4th grade girl [eG01fnsa] A long time ago there was this girl in our neighborhood. I’ve never seen her

there before, and she was like riding her bike or something. And then we were friends. We got friends after a while, you know, and then like one day I told her that I hated her. And she was spending the night then, and I told her in the morning. So then she took all her stuff and went home. She was all crying. I don’t know if that would be it.

In Length, this story of 15 clauses contains 87 words, only one of which contains more than two syllables (the derived noun neighborhood); in Density, less than a quarter of the words are Open Class (19/87 = 21.8%); in Diversity, nearly one third of the words (27/87 = 31.0%) are used more than once, most of them non-content items; in Register, there is not a single word of Latinate origin, nor any Abstract nouns, and only one Adjective — long in the formulaic context of ‘a long time ago’.

Consider, next, at the other end of the scale, the expository text written by a graduate school student who had been asked to discuss or give his ideas on the same topic of interpersonal conflict, totaling 30 clauses in all.9

(2) Expository text written by a graduate-school adult [eA01mewa] Conflicts and problems between people are often avoidable, I believe, and yet

they seem to occupy a considerable amount of our time and energy. Based on conversations I have overheard in places like coffee shops, I think people should take a moment and think about why the problem is occurring before taking on an automatic adversary role.

If people with a conflict or problem would try and consider the other person’s point of view, perspective, and reason for being at the opposite side of the problem as them, then maybe a resolution to the problem could be easily reached. It would not only help solve the problem, it might help straighten out the other person of some deeper conflict and in half the cases even the person who is addressing the other side. Of course not all problems can be dealt with in this way, the world is not a perfect place. In these cases it is better to avoid the situation altogether and minimize the problem, even to the point where it just fades away .

I believe problems, however, are meant to be solved, and doing so is one of the challenges and joys of interactions with other people. Being social is about cooperating, and solving the problems we have with each other is what makes a society work .

The 30 clauses in this text contain a total of 227 words, so averaging 7.6 words per clause, a much higher mean clause length (MCL) than the child’s text in (1), with

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 189

an MCL of 5.8 words per clause (Berman & Ravid 2009). Moreover, in Length, slightly over 10% of the words (23/227) are polysyllabic, of three or more syllables long (e.g. avoidable, occupy, conversation); in Density, one-third are open-class words (82/227) as against fewer than a quarter in the child’s oral narrative in (1), indicating a relatively high ratio of semantically contentful elements as against grammatical closed-class items or referentially ‘empty’ or interactively motivated discourse markers (Ravid & Berman 2006), contrasting markedly with the less than one-third of open-class words in the child’s text in (1).

In Diversity, this adult’s written essay appears similar to that of the child, since here, too, around one third (77/227 = 34%) of the words are repeated, the bulk of which are closed-class grammatical items or else thematically crucial content words like conflict, problem, solve. However, in considering the extent to which words are repeated in a given text, overall text length needs to be taken into ac-count — a major motivation for the replacement of traditional type/token ratios by VOCD scores, as explained in Malvern et al. (2004) — since the story in (1) is less than half the size of the essay in (2) in both number of words and clauses.

In Register, the text in (2) contains a relatively high ratio of Latinate to Ger-manic words, since the former (for example, in the last paragraph, the word-types solve, challenge, problem, joy, interaction, people, social, cooperate, society) account for as many as over two-thirds of all content words in the text (55/82). Then, too, typically for this kind of text, it rates high on Abstractness, since its content vocab-ulary includes a relatively high proportion of abstract and derivationally complex nouns (22 out of a total 62 nouns = 35%), such as perspective, adversary, resolution, challenges, interaction. Another factor ‘elevating’ the level of lexical usage of the text in (2) is the large number of adjectives that it contains, including derivational-ly complex, sophisticated items (e.g. avoidable, considerable, automatic, opposite).

In sum, the two randomly selected texts in (1) and (2) illustrate how lexical us-age — as defined by the measures we selected for the present study — distinguishes markedly between the quality of linguistic expression in the relatively colloquial, everyday, prosaically ‘flat’ flavor of the story told by a schoolchild compared with the elevated style of the expository essay written by an adult on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict.

The examples in (1) and (2), illustrating how we applied our different mea-sures, combine the factors of modality and genre under the cover-term ‘text type’. This suited the aims of the analysis to follow, which deliberately focuses on the impact of modality without concern for the factor of genre. As such, it aims to test predictions for writing-speech differentiation that emerge from prior research of our own and others, most of which analyzed genre rather than modality or else considered intersections between the two. First, we expect lexical usage to reflect modality-related differences across the population, irrespective of discourse genre

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190 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

— as suggested by findings of earlier studies dealing with syntactic structures in comparable data-bases that have revealed clear differences between written and spoken texts in different languages. Secondly, we expect that texts produced in writing will score higher than their oral counterparts on all or most of the lexical criteria we have defined. Thirdly, based on prior findings of the cross-linguistic project, we assume that high-school age will reflect a major cut-off point in modal-ity differentiation (Berman 2008). Fourthly, we suggest that mastery of written language may exert a differential effect at different phases of development: Younger children will write very much as they speak, whereas with age, the written language may have an increasing impact on the spoken usage of adolescents and adults.

3. Findings and analyses

We start by comparing the spoken and written texts produced by the entire popula-tion, including all four age-groups and both discourse genres along the five lexical measures of word length (Figure 1), register (Figure 2), density (Figure 3), diver-sity (Figure 4), and noun abstractness (Figure 5). These figures, presented below in sequence, demonstrate remarkably similar trends for each of the five analyses.

A set of repeated-measure ANOVAs yielded significant differences for all five dependent variables. Written texts contain markedly more polysyllabic words (F(1,71) = 24.9, p < 0.01), a higher ratio of Latinate/Germanic words (F(1,71) = 104.6, p < 0.01), a higher proportion of content words (F(1,71) = 9.9, p < 0.01), a more varied lexicon (F(1,49) = 33.3, p < 0.01), and more abstract nouns (F(1,71) = 38.3, p < 0.01). These findings confirm our first two predictions: Modality is shown to have a marked and consistent effect on text-embedded lexical usage.

Word Length

00.05

0.10.15

0.20.25

0.30.35

0.40.45

0.5

Spoken Texts Written Texts

Figure 1. Proportion of polysyllabic words out of total words, by modality [n = 79]

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 191

Considering, next, the developmental factor of age-schooling level, recall that findings noted earlier for different languages in the cross-linguistic sample all showed a marked age-related increase in level of linguistic expression, includ-ing when measured by one or more of the criteria applied here to evaluate lex-ical usage. However, as noted earlier, these analyses typically focused on genre rather than modality, or else they considered how the two intersect. The analyses presented here, in contrast, consider age-related modality effects irrespective of genre, by pooling data from both the narrative and expository texts in writing compared with speech. To start, we conducted repeated-measure ANOVAs, in order to trace a general developmental picture with respect to our five measures of lexical usage. The following patterns emerged. First, Word Length and Den-sity showed no significant age-related changes. Secondly, Register, Diversity, and

Register

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

Spoken Texts Written Texts

Figure 2. Ratio of words of Latinate versus Germanic origin out of all content words, by modality [n = 79]

Lexical Density

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Spoken Texts Written Texts

Figure 3. Proportion of content words out of total words, by modality [n = 79]

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192 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

Abstractness revealed similar age-related changes, as detailed below. A significant difference was found for use of high Register vocabulary (F(3,71) = 53.9, p < 0.01), with a Scheffe post hoc test grouping G-IV and J-VII together (M = 0.23, M = 0.34 respectively), as distinct from H-XI (M = 0.7), with AD again performing sig-nificantly better (M = 1.0). In lexical Diversity, a significant difference was found (F(3,49) = 18.9, p < 0.01), with a Scheffe post hoc test setting G-IV (M = 46.3) apart from J-VII (M = 62.2), with H-XI grouping together with AD on this dimension (M = 74.9, M = 81.5 respectively). For noun Abstractness, a significant difference was found (F(3,71) = 46.9, p < 0.01), with a Scheffe post hoc test grouping G-IV and J-VII together (M = 24.9, M = 34.3 respectively), as distinct from H-XI (M = 49), with AD performing significantly better (M = 62.2). In other words, on the three measures where age-related differences emerged, as expected from earlier studies

Lexical Diversity

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Spoken Texts Written Texts

Figure 4: Ratio of word-types to total words as measured by VOCD (Malvern et al, 2004), by modality [n = 49]10

Noun Abstracness

34

36

38

40

42

44

46

48

Spoken Texts Written Texts

Figure 5. Proportion of abstract nouns out of total nouns, by modality [n = 79]

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 193

of other facets of this and related data-bases, high school adolescence emerges as distinct from the two younger groups in all cases; G-IV children are similar to J-VII students in some but not all respects, and H-XI students differ from AD students on only one measure (of Noun Abstractness).

In order to examine our third prediction for how the writing-speech dis-tinction interacts with the variable of age, we conducted a set of paired-sample T-Tests. These revealed a rather different picture than expected. First, texts pro-duced by the youngest group of G-IV children showed no significant differences between the two modalities. In the next group, J-IV, texts differed significantly in four of the five measures (Length: t(df=19) = −3.9, p < 0.01; Register: t(df=19) = −5.6, p < 0.01; Density: t(df=19) = −4.7, p < 0.01; Diversity: t(df=19) = −5, p < 0.01), that is, except for Abstract noun usage. Only in the high-school group were significant differences found across all five variables (Length: t(df=19) = −3.8, p < 0.01; Regis-ter: t(df=19) = −5.9, p < 0.01; Density: t(df=19) = −5.4, p < 0.01; Diversity: t(df=19) = −4.6, p < 0.01; Abstractness: t(df=19) = 8.1, p < 0.01 ). In the AD group, similar signifi-cant writing-speech differences emerged for lexical usage (Length: t(df=19) = −2.7, p < 0.01; Register: t(df=19) = −6.5, p < 0.01; Diversity: t(df=19) = −4.4, p < 0.01; Ab-stractness: t(df=19) = 2.8, p < 0.05 ) and they, too, differed from the group below (H-VII) in one measure — this time, lexical Density rather than noun Abstractness.

Our predictions for increased differentiation between written and spoken us-age as a function of age were thus only partially confirmed. The developmental shift formulated in our third prediction does take place but not as expected — between junior high and high school. Instead, a major shift in lexical usage as a function of writing versus speech emerges here between the youngest G-IV group and the next age-group, the 12 to 13 year old J-VII’s. Another unexpected finding is that the lexicon-based written-spoken distinction differentiates between the H-XI high school group from the J-VII group only on the fifth variable noun Abstractness.

These results can be interpreted as partially confirming our fourth prediction for an age-related increase in inter-modality differentiation. Thus, as expected, the grade-school students use very much the same kind of lexicon when they write as when they speak, while the two older groups of school children distinguish more clearly between the two modalities. However, with respect to the possible impact of written language on speech, only adults exhibit what might be interpreted as a tendency to speak more as they write, reflected here by their use of the same proportion of semantically informative content words in their spoken as in their written texts.

One way to test the possible impact of writing on speech is to examine the effect of task order (written texts produced before or after their spoken counter-parts, respectively). To date, the sparse research on the topic has yielded results that are conflicting or at best inconclusive. Thus, the analysis of complex syntactic

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194 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

structures in similar data-bases in French reveals certain age- and genre-related effects for order (Gayraud et al. 2001). Such effects are reported for Spanish mainly for lexical usage rather than for syntax (Liliana Tolchinsky, personal communica-tion), while analysis of adjective distribution and use in Hebrew texts produced by speaker-writers in parallel age-groups failed to reveal an effect for order (Ravid & Levie 2010).

In the current study, the ANOVA analyses comparing texts produced in speech and writing across the population in English yielded no effect for order. Written texts scored higher on each of our measures of lexical usage, irrespective of whether they were produced before or after their spoken counterparts. Con-sequently, in order to test order effects in interaction with development, we con-ducted pairwise independent sample T-Tests: These compared G-IV with J-VII, J-VII with H-XI, and H-XI with AD in spoken (Table 1a) and written (Table 1b) texts, by order of production — written before spoken (orders A and C) or spoken before written texts (orders B and D). Tables 1a and 1b present t-values for each comparison across the five measures of lexical usage, with single and double aster-isks in the highlighted cells indicating level of statistical significance (for details of raw scores, see Appendix).

The highlighted cells in Table 1a show that in speech, order of text produc-tion has a differential effect depending on age, but that this does not apply equal-ly in all lexical domains or from one age-group to the next. Table 1b displays a similar overall picture in writing, but with more differences in terms both of the interaction between age and order effects and of the number of lexical domains that show these effects.

Taken together, the data in Table 1a and 1b show that, developmentally, J-VII students differ only marginally from G-IV children but markedly from H-XI

Table 1a. Pairwise comparisons (t-values) across five measures of lexical usage in spoken texts, by age and order

Group comparisons

Order Word Length

Register Lexical Density

Lexical Diversity

Noun Abstractness

G-IV vs.J-VII

SP/WR −.323 −.993 .137 −.072 −.299**

WR/SP .215 −.850 −.061 −1.49 −1.11

J-VII vs.H-XI

SP/WR −.117 −4.8** −1.02 −2.29* −.723

WR/SP .652 −2.97** −1.10 −5.10** −3.53**

H-XI vs. AD SP/WR −.573 −2.85* −1.10 −1.24 −4.64**

WR/SP .355 −1.83 .265 −1.18 −1.70

** Significance is lower than the .01 level (2-tailed) * Significance is lower than the .05 level (2-tailed)

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 195

students with respect to the impact of task order on the distinction between the texts they produce in speech compared with writing, while H-XI students, in turn, differ very little from the AD in this respect. That is, in line with what we had pre-dicted, high school emerges as a cut-off point in the writing-speech distinction.

As for the effect of task order in relation to each measure of lexical usage, the picture that emerges is rather complex, particularly when both modality and age-schooling level are taken into account. First, four out of the five measures — with the exception of Length — did reveal effects for order, but these were partial and inconsistent. The variable of Register, while affected both by age-schooling (with an age-related increase in words of Latinate origin) and modality (consistently higher Latinate/Germanic ratio in written texts), revealed order effects only in the spoken texts and only between the two top age-groups (H-XI versus AD) when speech precedes writing (M = 0.48 and M = 0.86) but not vice versa. As for lexi-cal Density, the only significant order effect that emerged was between J-VII and H-XI, only in the written texts, and only when writing preceded speech. Lexical Diversity yielded a different picture: Order effects were observed across the three school-age groups, but with different patterns. J-VII scored significantly higher than G-IV on lexical Diversity in writing when writing preceded speech. In con-trast, H-XI scored significantly higher than J-VII in writing only when speech preceded writing. Abstract noun usage showed yet another different pattern of task order effects. In G-IV and J-VII comparisons, order effects emerged in speech only when spoken texts preceded the written. But when speech followed writing, there was no such difference, since the scores of G-IV and J-VII were closer to one an-other (M = 24.2 and M = 31.1, respectively). Comparing J-VII and H-XI, the older group used more abstract nouns than the younger group in their spoken texts, but only if writing preceded speech. In contrast, the AD group used relatively more

Table 1b. Pairwise comparisons (t-values) across five measures of lexical usage in written texts, by age and order

Group comparisons

Order Word Length

Register Lexical Density

Lexical Diversity

Noun Abstractness

G-IV vs.J-VII

SP/WR −.278 −.308** −.033 −.772 −1.05

WR/SP −.483 −4.04** −.164 −3.44** −1.42

J-VII vs.H-XI

SP/WR 1.67 −4.19** .691 −2.34* −3.34**

WR/SP −.960 −2.96** −2.69* −1.58 −6.03**

H-XI vs. AD SP/WR .405 −1.8 .140 −1.64 −3.82**

WR/SP .229 −1.98 .086 −.595 −.267

** Significance is lower than the .01 level (2-tailed) * Significance is lower than the .05 level (2-tailed)

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196 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

abstract nouns in both writing and in speech than H-XI, but this difference was significant only when speech preceded writing. Thus, the patterns that emerge for task-order effects on the development of modality-based distinctions in use of the lexicon in speech compared with writing yield a non-monolithic picture, along lines discussed below.

4. Summary and discussion

Analyses comparing lexical usage in narrative and expository texts produced in speech compared with writing reveal marked modality-related differences across the population of schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults. Our findings for the im-pact of modality on the lexicon used in texts produced in English provide further evidence for trends that emerged in the larger cross-linguistic project for linguistic domains other than the lexicon and in languages other than English (Berman & Ravid 2009; Jisa 2004a, b; Tolchinsky & Rosado 2005). Moreover, written texts score higher than their spoken counterparts on all five measures that we applied. Taken together, our findings reflect insights from discourse analysis and literacy studies to the effect that “the constructions of written language manifest greater compactness and a higher degree of syntactic integration than the more fragmen-tary and paratactic arrangement of spoken utterances” (Hopper 2001) and that, as compared with when they speak, “Writers draw on an enlarged vocabulary, a more formalized grammar, a more logically organized rhetorical structure” (Ol-son 2006). The study thus demonstrates the claim that, indeed, written language as evaluated here constitutes a style of discourse distinct from its oral counter-parts, even when these take the form of monologic texts rather than interactive conversation. Moreover, it shows that lexical usage, as defined by five different text-embedded measures, is an effective means of differentiating between written and spoken language, and that it faithfully reflects the more elevated and carefully monitored style associated with writing.

As for the independent variable of development, analyzed here with genre and modality combined together, lexical usage revealed high school adolescents as distinguished across the board from the two younger groups, while differing significantly from the adults only on a single measure (nominal Abstractness). This points to adolescence as a developmental watershed in discourse-embedded lexical usage — in line with findings not only for other domains of local linguistic expression such as clause-level syntax, but also in relation to general text construc-tion abilities, including: overall discourse stance and perspective-taking (Ber-man 2005); formulation of text openings and closings (Berman & Katzenberger 2004; Tolchinsky, Johansson & Zamora 2002); inter-genre flexibility (Berman &

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 197

Nir-Sagiv 2007); and quality of narrative evaluation (Ravid & Berman 2006). In this respect, development of language knowledge in the present study reflected in use of words as the smallest and most basic building-blocks of human discourse mirrors the lengthy path from early childhood to adolescence that has been dem-onstrated for monologic discourse construction in general.

However, when development is considered in interaction with modality, as in the present study, a less consistent picture emerges across and between the four groups of participants. Grade-school students in middle childhood write very much as they speak, even though they are already capable of producing narrative and expository texts in both modalities. An exception in this respect is reliance on ‘ancillary’ material lacking in referential content in their spoken texts, a property that we elsewhere explained as deriving from the demands of online processing constraints (Ravid & Berman 2006). Middle school pre-adolescents emerge in this connection as an intermediate group, being like the children in the younger group on some measures, but more like their seniors in high school in other respects — a finding that indicates that lexical usage is a sensitive and multi-faceted means of diagnosing level of text-embedded language use. High school adolescents, in con-trast, are clearly distinguished from the youngest group of grade-school children on all measures, indicating that by this level of age and schooling, students are indeed able to relate to written language as a distinct style of linguistic expression (Ravid & Tolchinsky 2002; Strömqvist et al. 2004).

A final thrust of our analysis was the prediction that, with increased age and levels of cognitive and literacy-based development, written language may come to have an increasing impact on the spoken — inter alia, due to the effect of great-er experience and facility in reading, a facet of literacy that is closely associated and develops in tandem with writing (Heller 1999). The idea that writing may change patterns of spoken usage, too, is formulated in Jisa’s (2004a) proposal that “learning to speak as you write [is] the key to academic success”. And it reflects Strömqvist’s (2006) claim that “the acquisition of writing interacts with the devel-opment of spoken language; the early acquisition and further development of writ-ten language will be influenced by spoken language, and the acquisition of written language will come to influence the further development of spoken language” (and see, too, Ong 1982). One way of operationalizing this idea is the suggestion that, with age, the oral texts of older participants that are produced after their counter-parts in writing will show an increased effect of written styles of usage (Gayraud et al. 2001). In other words, it could be expected that participants who first wrote their texts (in the present instance, those in groups B and D, as specified in note 3) might subsequently produce spoken texts that made use of more elevated, more variegated, and more abstract lexical items than their peers who first spoke and then wrote their texts. However, as noted previously, our findings here suggest

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198 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

that different facets of lexical usage are differentially affected by task order. For example, overall, noun Abstractness emerged as the single variable that is most affected by order of elicitation, across age-groups, suggesting that this measure is particularly sensitive to the interplay between specifically linguistic and more general conceptual development. Moreover, order effects varied not only from one lexical measure to another, they also differed in age-level and direction of effect. For example, the finding of task-order effects for Register — as measured by the Latinate/Germanic ratio — suggests that adults might deliberately highlight inter-modality distinctiveness by using less elevated language in speech than they for-merly had in writing, which could be taken to mean that adults speak less rather than more like they write, so reversing our prediction. In contrast, with respect to lexical Diversity — as measured by VOCD scores — task order effects emerged for all three groups of schoolchildren, but patterning in different directions in a way that might be taken to suggest that in the middle school pre-adolescent (J-VII) group, having first produced a text in speech might have a negative impact on how many different words are used, so supporting our finding that the written language expression of these students in general remains much the same as that they use in speech. Yet a different pattern emerged for the criterion of semantic Abstractness — as measured by reliance on abstract, typically derivationally complex nouns: Here, the youngest group of participants appear most sensitive to task order in the direction writing before speech, suggesting that when they have had the time to reflect in the course of producing a written text, this impacts the kinds of nouns they will use; among high school adolescents, order effects for abstract noun us-age indicate a consistent narrowing of the gap between how they speak and how they write, while, rather surprisingly, the adults — who in general use significantly more abstract nouns than other groups — employ more such vocabulary when they start out by speaking and only subsequently write their texts.

In sum, while our analyses reveal a consistent picture with respect to age and modality across all five measures, when order effects are taken into account, a complex, multi-faceted and bi-directional picture emerges with respect to all three variables of age, specific lexical measure, and order effects. This contrasts not only with the robust effects that we found for the other independent variables analyzed in this study, but also with earlier research that revealed marked and straightfor-ward effects of development and of modality on linguistic expression, with lexicon and syntax correlating strongly (Berman & Nir 2009).

These variable findings for task-order effects across the factors of age, type of measure and, as noted earlier, different languages (for example, French compared with Spanish) suggest caution in applying this as a unique criterion across differ-ent facets of linguistic expression and text construction abilities. While the idea of task-order effects is in principle a good one, the way these are assessed might

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 199

need to be adjusted. For example, task-order might be better controlled if a single participant were to produce different texts under both conditions so that the same person would, say, first write and then tell a story at one session, and then first tell (possibly a different) story and then write it at another session. Another line of investigation might be to select a different domain for evaluating the effect of task order in comparing texts produced in writing compared with speech. While prior studies have demonstrated clearly convergent results for different facets of lexical usage, on the one hand, and for how these correlate with clause-level syntax, on the other (Berman & Nir 2009; Nir-Sagiv et al. 2008), it would be worth going beyond local linguistic expression to shed further light on the effect of order of text production. Global text construction abilities and overall organization of dis-course (Berman & Nir-Sagiv 2007, 2009) might prove particularly sensitive to the order in which texts are produced, spoken preceding written or vice versa.

Alternatively, it might be necessary to devise an entirely different line of in-vestigation apart from or at least in addition to the variable of task order, to sub-stantiate the proposal that, with age and greater literacy, people’s written language skills filter down increasingly into the way they speak. And indeed, observational evidence demonstrates that in lexical usage as in other facets of language use, more mature and literate speaker-writers have access to more complex and sophisti-cated means of linguistic expression — in presenting their ideas, in arguing, in discussing abstract topics, in giving talks, and so on. This suggests in turn that, in examining the issue of the impact of writing on speaking, careful account should be taken of the factor of genre. In the context of the present study, for example, it makes sense that written language skills may have a more marked impact on spoken language usage in the more cognitively demanding task of expository text construction than of narration.

This leads us to the question of genre, as our final point of discussion. The pres-ent study deliberately factored out the issue of genre in order to focus on modality. In general, however, discourse analysts, as well as researchers working on various topics and in different languages in our cross-linguistic project, demonstrate that in fact genre and modality intersect whenever a piece of discourse is produced. When a person writes, he or she produces a particular piece of writing — an e-mail message, a letter (to a friend, applying for a job, recommending a colleague for a position), an essay, a piece of fiction, a research article. The same is true of spoken language, given the obvious differences in language use between the most colloquial, informal, unmonitored, less planned style of expression in conversa-tional interaction compared with more carefully structured, often pre-planned talks or lectures, on the one hand, and monologic texts elicited in the framework of a school-based research project like the one reported here, on the other. Ac-cordingly, as we hope to have shown in the present study, it is an interesting and

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200 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

worthwhile exercise to separate out modality as a special topic for comparison, and this can be effectively achieved by analyzing different facets of lexical usage. Ultimately, however, the quality of any piece of discourse will depend on the in-terplay between the two factors of genre and modality since, particularly in the case of non-expert text construction of the type considered here, language use is neither modality- nor genre-specific, but rather an emergent property of the in-teraction between the two.

Notes

1. Comparable data were collected in seven different languages in the framework of a large-scale cross-linguistic project on developing literacy funded by the Spencer Foundation, Chicago, Ruth Berman, PI, as written up in two special journal issues (Written Language and Literacy 5, Nos. 1 and 2, 2002; Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 2, 2005; with motivations and findings reviewed in Berman 2008). We are grateful to Judy Reilly, San Diego State University, who was responsible for data-elicitation and transcription in English.

2. Our study thus differs from other linguistically and psycholinguistically motivated compari-sons of writing versus speech (most notably Biber) since we deliberately compare the two mo-dalities across the same speaker-writers.

3. The design was thus as follows: Order A: NS>NW, ES>EW; Order B: NW>NS, EW>ES; Or-der C: ES>EW, NS>NW; Order D: EW>ES, NW>NS.

4. Text ID was labeled as follows: Language [e = English], age-group [G = grade school, J = junior high, H = high school, A = adults], participant number [01 to 20], participant sex [f / m], genre [n = narrative, e = expository], modality [w / s], and order of elicitation [a, b, c, or d — as ex-plained in Note 3].

5. In fact, although participants were explicitly told that they could make rough drafts before submitting their written versions, they almost never did so.

6. Some researchers include adverbs in the category of content words, but we deliberately de-cided to exclude them as a notoriously variable class, where even the morphological feature of suffixal –ly as a mark of manner adverbs in English (analogous to ment(e) in French or Spanish) is often used to indicate intensifiers or hedges as noted later in the study.

7. In the interest of comparability and randomness, the examples are taken from texts produced by the participant assigned the number 1 out of the 20 in each group of the population, hence both elicited by Order A: producing their expository essay last of the four texts (see note 3).

8. For ease of cross-linguistic and other comparisons, the original ‘mirror version’ transcripts of these texts were standardized to represent conventional spelling and punctuation, and were stripped of ‘ancillary’ material representing disfluencies in the form of hesitation syllables, false starts, repairs, and lexical repetitions (Ravid & Berman 2006).

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 201

9. Total text length, as measured in both words and in clauses, is clearly age-related, so that the adult texts are invariably much longer than those of the children, which is consistent with find-ings from a wide range of studies in this and unrelated research (see, for example, Berman & Nir 2009; Berman & Slobin 1994).

10. The N here is smaller than the total population of 79 participants, since the VOCD proce-dure automatically excludes texts that contain fewer than 35 words.

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204 Ruth A. Berman and Bracha Nir

Appendix

Means and standard deviations of lexical measures in spoken texts, by grade and order of production

Age group Order Word Length

Register Lexical Density

Lexical Diversity

Noun Abstractness

Grade IV SP/WR 1.95(1.5)

.18(.11)

36.83(3.2)

52.63(2.6)

18.01(13.2)

WR/SP 1.94(1.2)

.23(.13)

36.82(3.5)

42.98(14.7)

24.16(16.9)

Grade VII SP/WR 2.47(1.3)

.23(.09)

36.59(4.5)

43.96(16.0)

34.44(11.3)

WR/SP 3.09(1.6)

.28(.11)

36.91(3.7)

53.93(8.4)

31.29(11.1)

Grade XI SP/WR 6.35(3.1)

.48(.14)

38.20(2.1)

62.13(13.7)

37.77(9.3)

WR/SP 5.95(2.4)

.50(.22)

38.42(2.2)

71.80(6.5)

47.69(9.7)

Adults SP/WR 7.69(2.9)

.86(.39)

42.1(11.1)

69.73(7.1)

62.17(13.5)

WR/SP 6.59(2.2)

.67(.21)

38.19(1.7)

77.07(12.5)

55.47(10.7)

Means and standard deviations of lexical measures in written texts, by grade and order of production

Age group Order Word Length

Register Lexical Density

Lexical Diversity

Noun Abstractness

Grade IV SP/WR 1.97(1.6)

.25(.13)

42.62(14.6)

48.14(3.0)

28.19(19.9)

WR/SP 2.19(1.5)

.27(.06)

39.37(19.8)

45.52(13.4)

29.43(10.8)

Grade VII SP/WR 4.61(1.5)

.43(.13)

42.64(5.2)

69.80(25.1)

35.54(9.5)

WR/SP 4.30(2)

.44(.12)

40.42(3.9)

77.05(16.4)

35.89(9.4)

Grade XI SP/WR 9(2.6)

.93(.36)

41.45(1.6)

78.94(7.4)

49.62(9.4)

WR/SP 10.40(4.1)

.87(.45)

45.5(4.5)

87.05(16.0)

60.93(9.2)

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The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation 205

Age group Order Word Length

Register Lexical Density

Lexical Diversity

Noun Abstractness

Adults SP/WR 12.32(1.9)

1.24(.36)

40.7(16.9)

86.45(11.9)

69.84(13.5)

WR/SP 11.64(2)

1.24(.38)

45.12(12.2)

91.23(15.4)

61.91(6.5)

Authors’ addresses

Ruth A. BermanTel Aviv UniversityLinguistics DepartmentRamat Aviv, Israel 69978

rberman@post.tau.ac.il

Bracha NirHaifa UniversityDepartment of Communication Sciences and DisordersMount CarmelHaifa, Israel 31999

bnir@univ.haifa.ac.il