This study introduces MedLex-25, a compact diagnostic instrument designed to measure recognition–production asymmetries in medical English vocabulary. The instrument was administered to 186 second-year medical students at the Medical University of Varna, Bulgaria, using nine parallel test forms (225 corpus-derived lexical targets; 9,300 responses). Each test paired receptive (multiple-choice) and productive (sentence generation) tasks across five lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and two-word multiword items). Results indicate a systematic recognition–production gap across all categories, with receptive knowledge consistently exceeding productive performance and no item achieving perfect production accuracy. Verbs, adjectives, and especially adverbs showed the greatest productive vulnerability. MedLex-25 provides item-level diagnostic insights that distinguish between recognition and productive control, supporting targeted vocabulary instruction in medical ESP. The study presents initial pilot evidence of the instrument’s feasibility and diagnostic sensitivity under classroom conditions. This work builds on prior findings reported in Metacognitive Mismatch in Medical ESP: Exploring the Recognition–Production Gap (Stanchev, 2025, Zenodo) and extends them through category-level and corpus-informed analysis. Notes:This record represents a confirmed conference paper (in press). The final peer-reviewed version will be published by the journal in 2026. Further information will be provided upon publication.
Evgeni Stanchev (Thu,) studied this question.
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