Abstract

During the school years, lexical acquisition is directly related to experience with written language. In this study we investigated how adolescents make lexical choices in two different discursive contexts: oral and written narratives. Participants were 24 adolescents that belonged to two different social environments, determined by the amount of previous experience with literacy. Narratives were analyzed for the presence of literary academic language. Therefore a semantic-pragmatic analysis of nouns using the Noun Scale Analysis (Ravid, 2006) was conducted. Results show differences between groups of adolescents and between oral and written modalities.

Keywords: Later language development, language in schools, lexical choice, narratives, nouns