The Lexical Complexity and Basic Vocabulary of the Italian Language

The comprehensibility of a text depends mainly on two factors: the lexicon and the syntax. Thanks also to computational tools, we present here a research study that aims to assess the level of comprehensibility of the lexicon of the texts used for the linguistic education of primary school children. In the study presented in this paper, we formalized the New Basic Vocabulary (NVdB) [6] by including it within the Italian for NooJ [15]. An experiment was carried out on a collection of texts of approximately 312,000 tokens. It is composed of classic and contemporary narratives for children, aged between 8 and 10, attending the last three years of primary school. In our research we will present the preliminary results of the analysis, which will show the text classification according to their level of lexical complexity. This type of textual analysis finds several fields of application in language education studies.