VOC-ADO: A lexical database for French-speaking adolescents

Abstract

We present VOC-ADO, a database of the written vocabulary of French adolescents between the ages of 11 and 15 (French secondary school students). VOC-ADO provides a wealth of lexical information for 110,338 words listed in school textbooks of all disciplines (i.e., academic vocabulary), as well as novels, comics, and magazines (i.e., non-academic vocabulary). For each word, several indexes of frequency and lexical dispersion are reported, as well as word length, syntactic categories, orthographic neighborhood size, and lemma frequency. Each analysis is presented separately for the Academic and Non-academic subcorpora, as well as for the overall Global corpus. Analyses of the corpora indicate that the Academic subcorpus contains a smaller variety of unique words than the Non-academic subcorpus and exhibits higher lexical sophistication. By contrast, there is a larger proportion of content words in non-academic media than in school textbooks. Finally, VOC-ADO shows a strong frequency correlation with Manulex, a French database of elementary school vocabulary, and Lexique, a lexical database of adult vocabulary. However, many words present in VOC-ADO are not found in elementary school vocabulary. These results underscore the need to examine lexical development beyond elementary school, considering the unique characteristics of the written vocabulary encountered by French-speaking adolescents. In this regard, VOC-ADO provides researchers, educators, and clinicians interested in adolescent literacy with a valuable tool to select and analyze words based on specific characteristics. The database is freely available and can be downloaded by clicking on the following link: VOC-ADO Database link.

Keywords: Adolescent; French; Literacy; Vocabulary.