Lexical richness in the advanced learner’s oral production of French and Italian L2 CHRISTINA LINDQVIST, CAMILLA BARDEL AND ANNA GUDMUNDSON IRAL 49 (2011), 221–240 0019042X/2011/049-221 DOI 10.1515/iral.2011.013 c Walter de Gruyter Abstract This study investigates Swedish learners’ lexical richness in French and Italian L2. A frequency-based measure was used to compare the lexical richness of learners at different proﬁciency levels to that of native speakers. Frequency bands based on oral L1 data were created for both languages to serve as a benchmark. For French, the results show that there are differences between two groups of learners at different proﬁciency levels concerning lexical richness. Moreover, the most advanced learners have a lexical proﬁle that is similar to that of a control group of native speakers, suggesting that these learners are native-like as far as lexical richness is concerned. The results for Italian also point at differences between the learner groups. However, the most advanced group does not reach the degree of lexical richness of the native speakers. The overall results support earlier proposals of a discriminating capacity of lexical frequency proﬁling methods for L2 proﬁciency. 1. Introduction In recent years, there has been a growing interest in L2 vocabulary acqui- sition (cf. e.g., Nation 2001; Bogaards and Laufer 2004; Daller et al. 2007; Treffers-Daller et al. 2008a; Milton et al. 2008). The research area covers dif- ferent aspects of the learner’s lexicon, such as cross-linguistic inﬂuences, lex- ical size, width and depth. Several studies dealing with different measures of lexical variation or richness have also appeared recently (see e.g., Tidball and Treffers-Daller 2007; Treffers-Daller et al. 2008a). A considerable proportion of the previous studies on vocabulary acquisition deals with English as a tar- get language (TL), although, as pointed out by Treffers-Daller et al. (2008b: 271) “one cannot discover universal principles or processes of Second Lan- guage Acquisition if the focus is on one language (English) only”. And, in fact, recently, a number of studies have emerged that focus on the acquisition