Abstract
In general, multilingual children have lower vocabulary competence than monolin-gual children when considering only one language (but more when considering all languages). If sufficient input is provided in all languages, however, the Comple-mentarity Principle (Grosjean 2016) hypothesizes equivalent vocabulary for mono-linguals and multilinguals speaking the same language. It is our objective to evalu-ate the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual students who have been studying together for several years and should, according to the Complementarity Principle, have a comparable vocabulary. For the analysis of student texts, we will use three sets of texts taken from the LEONIDE corpus (Glaznieks et al., 2022). The sets were built to take into account the language background of the students (monolingual German-speakers, bilingual German-speakers, and multilingual non-L1-German-speakers). Due to the fact that the texts of the students are not equal, we will utilize the Lexical Diversity Measure to compare the vocabulary of each student. It has been shown that learner character-ristics profoundly influence measures of lexical diversity, range, and sophistication (e.g., Meurers 2015). This poster will try an eval-uation of different tools and measures for lexical diversity, including an evaluation of the RNN-tagger developed by Schmidt (2019). Considering school-related topics, we expect that the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual students after a suffi-cient period of schooling is equally large. Moreover, we hope to gain knowledge about which measures of lexical diversity are more useful for (short) student texts. Consequently, lexical diversity measures would likely be useful tools for comparing the vocabulary of individual texts, and the expected results would have important implications for the judgement of the vocabulary of multilingual individuals.