Richness of Vocabulary: An Attributional Analysis

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Abstract
Five experiments demonstrated a positive relationship between a speaker's lexical diversity level and listeners' judgments of his socioeconomic status, competence, emotional state, and communication effectiveness. Two other language variables, lexical density and syntactic diversity, did not yield such relationships. Level of lexical diversity did not consistently affect listeners' attitudes toward neutral concepts described by speakers, nor did it affect perceptions of speakers' trustworthiness. Subjects were 426 male and female undergraduates at the University of Iowa. Generally the results indicate the existence of a stereotype for lexical diversity, and, in light of recent evidence that socioeconomic status is not in fact a determinant of diversity, they point to the need for an exploration of the genesis of persons' beliefs about attributes associated with richness of vocabulary.