vocd

English

Alternative forms

• VOCD, VocD, vocD

Etymology

Abbreviation of vocabulary diversity. ‘vocd’ is the name of a computer program originally published in 2004 by Gerard McKee. The program calculates lexical diversity for use in psycholinguistic analysis, and the tool’s name is used somewhat interchangeably to describe the measure it provides.

Noun

vocd (uncountable)

1. (corpus linguistics) A measure of the lexical diversity of a given corpus, determined by comparing the sizes of steadily larger random samples from the corpus against their respective type-token ratios.
   • 2000–2023, Brian MacWhinney, The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk‎^[1], 3rd edition, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, →DOI, page 110:

     The VOCD command was written by Gerard McKee of the Department of Computer Science, The University of Reading. [...] The complete description of VOCD can be found in: Malvern, D., Richards, B., Chipere, N., & Purán, P. (2004).

   • 2008, Eliza Carlson Lee, Leslie Rescorla, “The Use of Psychological State Words By Late Talkers at Ages 3, 4 and 5 Years”, in Applied Psycholinguistics, volume 29, →DOI, page 23:

     A recently developed index of lexical diversity, vocD, uses repeated calculations of the type–token ratio (TTR) over a range of tokens to show how the TTR varies in relation to sample size. […] Owen and Leonard (2002) found that children with SLI between the ages of 3 and 7 had lower scores on vocD based on 100 utterances than age-matched, typically developing comparison children […]

   • 2016, Stephen Kintz, Heather Harris Wright, “Semantic Knowledge Use in Discourse: Influence of Age”, in Discourse Processes, volume 54, →DOI, page 7:

     A paired sample t-test was conducted and results indicated no significant differences between vocd scores for younger and older participants, t(29) = 1.154, p = .253.

   • 2018, Jessica L. Montag, Michael N. Jones, Linda B. Smith, “Quantity and Diversity: Simulating Early Word Learning Environments”, in Cognitive Science, volume 42, number 52, →DOI, page 380:

     To calculate a VOCD, words from a corpus are randomly sampled, in increasing sample sizes. The resultant curve relating sample size and type-token ratio is plotted, and a value is fit to a segment of that curve.