Using Native-Speaker Psycholinguistic Norms to Predict Lexical Proficiency and Development in Second-Language Production

A large data set of L1 psycholinguistic norms (Balota et al. 2007) was used to assess spoken L2 English lexical proficiency in cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpora. Behavioral norms included lexical decision and word naming latencies (i.e. reaction times) and accuracies for 40,481 English words. A frequency measure was included to compare the relative strength of the norms to a traditional lexical measure when explaining proficiency...