The basic questions that guide this study are: (a) what percentage of vocabulary from a passage would a Spanish learner need to know to demonstrate ‘adequate’ (a score of 70 out of 100) comprehension of it? And, (b) what type of curve would best describe the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension? Fifty-three students enrolled in two courses of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) at a metropolitan university read a newspaper article, underlined the unknown vocabulary and then answered a reading comprehension test. Our findings suggest, as in previous studies for English as a Second Language (ESL), that a 98% of vocabulary coverage is needed to show adequate comprehension of an authentic passage. The curve that best describes this relationship was not linear as they concluded but was similar to a logarithmic function, which appears to suggest a relationship that obeys to a law of diminishing returns for Spanish as a Second Language (SSL) reading.

中文翻译：

---

词汇能力和阅读理解：西班牙语的传统语言学习者的初步研究

指导这项研究的基本问题是：（a）西班牙语学习者需要知道多少百分比的词汇才能证明其“足够”（100分中的70分）？并且，（b）哪种类型的曲线最能描述词汇知识与阅读理解之间的关系？在都市大学攻读两门西班牙语作为传统语言（SHL）的课程的53名学生阅读了报纸上的文章，强调了未知的词汇，然后回答了阅读理解测试。我们的发现表明，与以前的英语作为第二语言（ESL）的研究一样，需要98％的词汇覆盖率才能充分理解真实的段落。最能描述这种关系的曲线在得出结论时不是线性的，但类似于对数函数，