A nuclear families word list for French

Abstract This between‐languages replication study relates the development and testing of a nuclear, families‐based, pedagogical word list for French as was previously done for English. A word family includes base and inflected words (or lemmas) plus derivations. A nuclear family is reduced to the most frequent of these, with less frequent members set aside according to a frequency criterion. Such a list is needed in French because existing French word lists are impractically large in size yet insufficient in coverage and being lemma based obscure the relationship between base, inflected, and derived words. The base list for nuclearization in French was created through a process of finding, fleshing out, and familizing a lemma list. The resulting base list is 3000 word families (25,141 word types) with 96%–98% coverage across a range of text types, in itself unique in French pedagogy. Nuclearizing the base list involved deriving one or more sublists from the base list through two user choices, a corpus representing a particular topic of interest or level of study and a frequency criterion within that corpus for inclusion of base list word types. The resulting nuclear list is 2,871 families in 10,458 word types with ∼90% coverage in texts potentially used in reading instruction.