Chinese speakers’ vocabulary size Table 9 The lexical profiles of the small corpora
1k Word Family MA DAMM MA HRM MA DM
1k 2k 3k 4k 5k 6k 7k 8k 9k
10k 11k 12k 13k 14k
Proper nouns
73.45 10.9 2.56 5.25 1.43 0.81 0.89 0.71 0.26 0.2
**0.35 0.31 0.58 0.12
1.45
73.25 12.57 2.5
3.06 1.28 1.24 0.41 0.39
**0.32 0.15 0.17 0.16 0.24 0.06
3.28
generate 98%. The corpora consisting of research articles require a larger vocabulary to reach 98% than either of the textbooks: HRM requiring 9,000 and DM requiring 11,000. These figures are broadly in line with Hsu (2011) who found that textbooks had a lower lexical load than research articles in business-related disciplines. The next results give coverage figures generated from combining the lexical profiles of the DAMM corpora with the
0.74 **98% coverage reached with this no. word families + proper nouns
word knowledge represented in each band of the VST scores of the DAMM student, to give a representative example of how the calculations were made. In Table 10, the first row shows the coverage figures for each 1k word band of the DAMM corpus. The second row shows how many answers student [A] answered correctly at each level of the VST. The third row shows the proportion of textual coverage of the corpus implied by this score.
