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• Arts and Culture
• Literature
• 01 / 09 / 2007

The study was presented in Santiago de Cuba as another important contribution of the Center of Applied Linguistics to the development of lexicological and lexicographic studies on the island.

The study is the result of over 20 years of work by a group of specialists led by doctors Vitelio Ruiz and Eloina Miyares. The text comprises a detailed description of the quality and quantity of the childrens vocabulary and reveals the most common elements in the use of words as nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Using completely new tools, such as lexical-statistical computer software, the research reviewed a body of approximately 700,000 words, of which 26,251 belong to the general lexis of elementary school students and 2,559 to a common youth lexis with differing degrees of frequency.

This research, which is unique in Cuba and already has been awarded with Cuban Science Academy award, is the master study from which valuable tools for understanding the islands mother tongue have been derived. Some of these are the Diccionario básico del escolar cubano, a method to prevent and eliminate spelling errors; the Diccionario escolar computadorizado, Vocabulario inverso y anagramas del español, and Ortografía integral, inventario de los lapsogramas en la secundaria básica, which was recently published.

Already considered an essential text to support and advance Cuban educational policy, the study is seen by its authors as a starting point for other researchers.

Source: Cubarte