The relationship of lexical sophistication to second language (L2) proficiency and L2 production quality has received much attention in the past a few decades. Viewed as a multidimensional construct, lexical sophistication has been measured using indices that tap into a range of distributional, formal, semantic, psycholinguistic, and processing properties. However, existing indices of lexical sophistication have not systematically accounted for the fact that many words are used with distinct senses in different contexts and that those senses may not be equally sophisticated for L2 learners. The current study  addresses this research gap by proposing a small set of sense-aware lexical sophistication indices and assess their predictive power for L2 writing quality both in comparison to and in combination with a large set of existing lexical sophistication indices. Results from an analysis of L2 writing data sourced from the CLC FCE Dataset (Yannakoudakis et al., 2011) show that some of the sense-aware lexical sophistication indices proposed correlated more strongly with and accounted for a larger proportion of variance in holistic scores of L2 writing quality than existing indices. The implications of our findings for L2 lexical sophistication research are discussed.

陆小飞，美国俄亥俄州立大学语言学博士，现任美国宾夕法尼亚州立大学应用语言学系教授、博士生导师。主要研究领域为语料库语言学、学术英语、二语写作、二语习得及计算机辅助语言教学。担任中国学术英语教学研究会国际顾问，Journal of Second Language Writing等多种国际期刊编委会成员，Applied Linguistics等40余种国际期刊特约审稿人。出版专著Computational Methods for Corpus Annotation and Analysis. 在Applied Linguistics, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Educational Researcher, English for Specific Purposes, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Learning & Technology, Language Teaching Research, Language Testing, ReCALL, System, TESOL Quarterly, The Modern Language Journal等权威期刊发表论文40余篇。开发的二语句法复杂度分析器和词汇复杂度分析器得到国际上二语写作与习得研究者的广泛应用。