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@article{volodina-etal-2022-crowdsourcing-336551,
	title        = {Crowdsourcing ratings for single lexical items: a core vocabulary perspective},
	abstract     = {In this study, we investigate theoretical and practical issues connected to differentiating between core and peripheral vocabulary at different levels of linguistic proficiency using statistical approaches combined with crowdsourcing. We also investigate whether crowdsourcing second language learners’ rankings can be used for assigning levels to unseen vocabulary. The study is performed on Swedish single-word items. 
The four hypotheses we examine are: (1) there is core vocabulary for each proficiency  level,  but  this  is  only  true  until  CEFR  level  B2  (upper-intermediate); (2) core vocabulary shows more systematicity in its behavior and usage, whereas  peripheral  items  have  more  idiosyncratic  behavior;  (3)  given  that  we have truly core items (aka anchor items) for each level, we can place any new unseen item in relation to the identified core items by using a series of comparative  judgment  tasks,  this  way  assigning  a  “target”  level  for  a  previously  unseen  item;  and  (4)  non-experts  will  perform  on  par  with  experts in  a  comparative  judgment  setting.  The  hypotheses  have  been  largely  confirmed:  In  relation  to  (1)  and  (2),  our  results  show  that  there  seems  to  be  some systematicity in core vocabulary for early to mid-levels (A1-B1) while we find less systematicity for higher levels (B2-C1). In relation to (3), we suggest crowdsourcing word rankings using comparative judgment with known anchor  words  as  a  method  to  assign  a  “target”  level  to  unseen  words.  With  regard to (4), we confirm the previous findings that non-experts, in our case language learners, can be effectively used for the linguistic annotation tasks in a comparative judgment setting.},
	journal      = {Slovenščina 2.0: Empirical, Applied and Interdisciplinary Research},
	author       = {Volodina, Elena and Alfter, David and Lindström Tiedemann, Therese},
	year         = {2022},
	volume       = {10},
	number       = {2},
	pages        = {5--61},
}