Principles of Developing Lexicon in Artificial Languages: Based on an Empirical Study

Even though the importance of the lexicon has not always been focus of mainstream language acquisition research, it is widely accepted that the lexicon is an integral element of language. Therefore, it was argued in this paper that effective strategies to build up the lexicon should be carefully considered when artificial languages are developed. To support this argument, an experiment of two groups (i.e., an experimental and control group) of Jaeyoung Kim Department of Liberal Arts, Seonam University 7-111 Pyeongchon-gil, Songak-myeon, Asan-si, Chungnam, Korea 31556 Email: jykim@seonam.ac.kr Received 10 August, 2017; Revised 2 September, 2017; Accepted 13 September, 2017 Copyright © 2017 Language Research Institute, Sejong University Journal of Universal Language is an Open Access Journal. All articles are distributed online under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 90 Principles of Developing Lexicon in Artificial Languages: Based on~ university students was carried out and it was found that vocabulary significantly affected their reading comprehension. Even though in the preliminary vocabulary test, no statistically significant differences were detected between the two groups, the experimental group obtained statistically higher scores in reading comprehension than the control group in English official test. Considering the results of the present research, it was proposed that the lexicon may play a crucial role in improving reading abilities in artificial languages. Hence, when developing artificial languages, it is better to creat a set of vocabulary that has commonality in many natural languages and is unmarked phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically. With this carefully chosen set of vocabulary, it is expected that users of the artificial languages would have better reading comprehension.