Vokabularraum

Vokabularraum, often translated as lexical space, is a term used in linguistics, cognitive science, and language technology to describe the set and organization of lexical items available to a language user or to a computational system. In the cognitive sense it refers to the mental lexicon—the repository of words, meanings, and grammatical properties that a speaker can retrieve and use. It is shaped by exposure, education, age, and context, and is commonly divided into active vocabulary and passive vocabulary.

In applied contexts the Vokabularraum denotes the scope of a model's vocabulary or the distinct word forms found in a corpus. For a language model, it is the set of tokens the model recognizes or generates; for a corpus, the vocabulary is the collection of lemmas or word forms. Tokenization, stemming, and subword models influence the effective Vokabularraum.

Measurement and use: Researchers estimate the Vokabularraum of learners with tests and production tasks, and corpus-based metrics such as type-token ratio or vocabulary size estimations. In education, awareness of the Vokabularraum informs curriculum design and strategies to expand active and receptive knowledge.

The term is descriptive and its exact scope varies by discipline. See also Wortschatz, Lexikon, lexical semantics, active and passive vocabulary, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing.