LexVEN

Abstract

While there is growing awareness that knowledge of regional minority languages must be protected, assessing the vitality of such varieties is challenging due to the lack of assessment materials. Our contribution documents the creation and validation of LexVEN, a bimodal yes/no vocabulary task, with the purpose of assessing the proficiency of users of Venetan with receptive and/or productive skills. The materials will be freely available. The vocabulary items were validated in a survey with 161 speakers of Italian, of which 136 came from the Veneto area. We have relied on Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) in validating test items, and we demonstrate correlations with self-reported measures of proficiency and language use. Given the absence of any other assessment tools of Venetan for cross-validation, we further collected speech samples from a subset of the Venetan participants with active proficiency whose proficiency was rated by native speakers of Venetan. We discuss the procedures within a validation framework, concluding that LexVEN is reliable as a proficiency assessment tool of Venetan.