Lexical Richness of Adolescents Across Multimodalities: Measures, Issues and Future Directions.

Lexical Richness (LR) is a scarcely researched subject in India. The objective of this paper is twofold: (i) To statistically inquire whether LR varies across three multimodalities: visual-only, audio-only, and audio-visual; and (ii) To see which of the two measures of LR (MATTR and Guiraud) is independent of text length and is best suited for short oral productions. 270 students across three types of schools were examined, out of whom 100 willingly completed all three oral tasks. The students were asked to retell the stories transacted in each modality in their own words. Randomization of sampling is done to mitigate the confounding modality bias. Additionally, the genre and parts of the storyline in each modality are similar. The students' oral speech samples were recorded, transcribed and analyzed on WordCruncher and TextElixir software. The results revealed that there is statistically significant variance among the modalities. Furthermore, the Moving Average Type Token Ratio (MATTR) is seen to be independent of text length compared to Index of Guiraud. This study also throws light on the observations made during the study, pertinent issues in the field of education, and future directions for research on LR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]