Title: Build your own word family: An adaptable vocabulary profiler for French, German and Spanish Authors: Finlayson, N., Marsden, E. & Anthony, L. Keywords: vocabulary, lexical profiling, foreign language education, materials development, language testing, French, German, Spanish Abstract: The most appropriate unit of counting for evaluating lexical knowledge continues to be debated in corpus-based vocabulary studies. Type counting is common in corpus research, but vocabulary researchers have traditionally used the word family unit, which relies on the assumption that learners can recognise links between derivationally related words. Recently, it has been suggested that the lemma or flemma might be the more appropriate unit across proficiency levels (e.g., McLean, 2018; Brown et al., 2020). However, studies seeking to provide evidence for the appropriacy of different types of lexical unit have yielded mixed results. Now, the conversation is turning to the importance of varying the selection of units according to pedagogical purpose and learner variables (e.g., Cobb & Laufer, 2021; Webb, 2021; first proposed by Bauer & Nation, 1993). A bespoke approach is particularly relevant in the study of declined or highly inflected languages. Learners of such languages with limited knowledge of L2 grammar and a more typologically related L1 might find mastering a lemma a more challenging task than acquiring a set of regular, transparent affixes. Counting lemmas may simultaneously overestimate these learners’ ability to recognise inflected forms, and underrepresent their capacity to recognise derived forms. In this talk, we present MultilingProfiler 3.0 (Finlayson et al., 2022), a vocabulary profiling tool designed to give corpus researchers and materials developers working in French, German, and Spanish more control over the lexical unit used to create profiles. Users can select which inflected and derived forms to include in the word definition, or choose a pre-made word list that uses a bespoke unit aligned with the grammar specifications of a particular curriculum or stage in a program of study. Results generated using these approaches are likely to better represent the lexical knowledge of the target learner group. References Bauer, L. & Nation, P. (1993). Word families. International Journal of Lexicography, 6, 253–279. Cobb, T., & Laufer, B. (2021). The nuclear word family list: A list of the most frequent family members, including base and affixed words. Language Learning, 71, 834–871. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12452 Finlayson, N., Marsden, E., & Anthony, L. (2022). MultilingProfiler (Version 3) [Computer software]. University of York. Accessed 22 December 2022 at https://www.multilingprofiler.net/ McLean, S. (2018). Evidence for the adoption of the flemma as an appropriate word counting unit. Applied Linguistics, 39, 823–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/APPLIN/AMW050 Webb, S. (2021). A different perspective on the limitations of size and levels tests of written receptive vocabulary knowledge. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43, 454–461. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263121000449 APA Citation: Finlayson, N., Marsden, E. & Anthony, L. (2023, July 5). Build your own word family: An adaptable vocabulary profiler for French, German and Spanish [Conference presentation]. CL 2023, Lancaster, UK. https://osf.io/c8qbj.