Abstract

CALVO DIAZ, Karen et al. Lexical mastery and semantic relationships: vocabulary validation for reasoning items. Educación [online]. 2023, vol.47, n.1, pp.337-349. ISSN 2215-2644.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/revedu.v47i1.51963.

This work aims to generate evidence of lexical mastery in the context of the semantic relationships of synonymy, antonymy, and theme. This multidisciplinary study analyzed an instrument composed of 21 items, presented to 3864 applicants that took the Academic Aptitude Test (Prueba de Aptitud Académica (PAA) in Spanish) for admission to the University of Costa Rica in 2021, and whose ages ranged from 17 to 21 years.

The results show that lexical mastery can indeed be measured in three categories that represent broad and common relationships in reading. The ability to identify these types of relationships affects the applicants’ performance, especially when solving items in the categories of opposition, paraphrase and reduction (all typical to the PAA) that require a level of lexical proficiency. Therefore, it is important to understand the links between lexical mastery and the semantic relationships themselves, free of context, to ensure that the measurement of general reasoning abilities is not affected, or to find mechanisms that avoid factors causing irrelevant variances in the instrument.

Keywords : Vocabulary; Semantics; Measuring; Test for Admission; Reasoning Abilities.

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