Lexical Density and Diversity in Written Language of Adolescents between 10–16 Years of Age

Language development starts from infancy and continues to persist even during adolescence. The adolescents are expected to use language in a complex manner throughout school and beyond (Nippold, Mansfield, Billow, & Tomblin, 2009). This language growth in adolescence is difficult to account for, as the rate of its development is subtle and gradual. Researchers have opined that higher level linguistic skills, such as syntax and semantics (Nippold, 2000) and/or pragmatics (Nippold, Ward-Lonergan, & Fanning, 2005) are not finely tuned until adolescence, with only a little change in phonology and morphology (Nippold, 1993). The semantic development in adolescence can be explained on the basis of comprehension of literate lexicons and figurative expressions (Nippold, 1993). Vaezi (2012) opined that the semantic system can also be studied in terms of the lexical complexity, which incorporates lexical density and lexical diversity.Lexical DensityLexical density is a measure of the information density within a text (Yates, 1996). It denotes the proportion of a number of content words to a total number of words (Ure, 1971) in a discourse. The content word denotes nouns, verbs, adjectives, and certain adverbs; whereas the total number of words includes all lexical and grammatical items. For example, in the sentence 'John had a dog and he loved his dog very much', this consist of six content words and eleven total number of words. In the above example, a lexical density value of 0.54 is obtained, wherein a value of one is the highest possible value, indicating maximum density. As lexical density increases, the text becomes more informative and reading complexity increases. Lexical density is a is a characteristic feature of written language, achieved through the lesser usage of clauses with high embedding, especially in a sentence with noun phrases (Halliday, 1989). Social death theories are derived from the science of thanatology, which studies death, dying and grief. There is obviously a vast difference between actual death and retirement from the sport, but Fortunato and Marchant (1999) suggested that upon retirement a part of an athlete (the elite competitor) dies. Rosenberg (1982) suggested that as an analogy, the concept of social death is better suited to involuntary, rather than voluntary retirement since the consequences of voluntary retirement are less severe because athletes retain control of their fate.The stages of dying concept given by KublerRoss (1969) include five stages; in the denial stage, the athlete denies the reality that the injury is serious. In the anger stage, the athlete becomes agitated with themselves and others such as friends and family. In the bargaining stage, athletes' tend to remain in the past and may bargain by making statements such as "I'll do anything to stay in the game. " In the depression stage, the athlete comes back to the present stage and may struggle to come to terms with the extent of the injury and uncertainty about their future. Finally, in the acceptance stage, the athlete accepts the reality that his/her career has ended and gradually makes a transition out of the sport (Fortunato & Marchant, 1999). To explore the transition process, there has been a shift from the models of thanatology, towards "transition models" (Young, Pearce, Kane, & Pain, 2006). The models of thanatology have been criticized as being inadequate when applied to athletic retirement (Kadlcik & Flemr, 2008) as they were developed with non-sporting populations (Blinde & Greendorfer, 1985) and they stereotype athlete reactions by portraying retirement in an overly negative light (Gordon & Lavallee, 2012). Moving a step forward from the models of thanatology, which viewed retirement as a singular event, the transition models view retirement as a process (Gordon & Lavallee, 2012). The Conceptual Model of Adaptation to Career Transition (Taylor & Ogilvie 1994; 2001) (Figure 1) has five steps; at the top, there are the causes of retirement which include age, deselection, injury and free choice. …