Talk:Vocabulary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Ideas for expansion

ideas for expansion: size of average person's vocab: differnet stages of childhood & adult (not sure myself of the stats) -- Tarquin 23:16 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)

This is an encyclopedic article and should not be moved to wiktionary. Rob Price 02:16, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Realistic account of a person's vocabulary

I don't know what BE university is, but I'd be amazed if an average vocabulary was 50K words, especially if you don't count inflections. Can anyone find more accurate numbers? Agentsoo 15:15, 14 July 2005 (UTC)


A vocabulary of 20K word families for a college student seems to be a more realistic estimate.

The below is cut-and-paste from an article by Paul Nation, a recognized expert on vocabulary. See http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/papers/cup.html

How many words do native speakers know?

For over 100 years there have been published reports of systematic attempts to measure the vocabulary size of native speakers of English. There have been various motivations for such studies but behind most of them lies the idea that vocabulary size is a reflection of how educated, intelligent, or well read a person is. A large vocabulary size is seen as being something valuable. Unfortunately the measurement of vocabulary size has been bedeviled by serious methodological problems largely centring around the questions of "What should be counted as a word?", "How can we draw a sample of words from a dictionary to make a vocabulary test?", and "How do we test to see if a word is known or not?". Failure to deal adequately with these questions has resulted in several studies of vocabulary size which give very misleading results. For a discussion of these issues see Nation (1993a), Lorge and Chall (1963), and Thorndike (1924).

Teachers of English as a second language may be interested in measures of native speakers' vocabulary size because these can provide some indication of the size of the learning task facing second language learners, particularly those who need to study and work alongside native speakers in English medium schools and universities or workplaces.

At present the best conservative rule of thumb that we have is that up to a vocabulary size of around 20,000 word families, we should expect that native speakers will add roughly 1000 word families a year to their vocabulary size. That means that a five year old beginning school will have a vocabulary of around 4000 to 5000 word families. A university graduate will have a vocabulary of around 20,000 word families (Goulden, Nation and Read, 1990). These figures are very rough and there is likely to be very large variation between individuals. These figures exclude proper names, compound words, abbreviations, and foreign words. A word family is taken to include a base word, its inflected forms, and a small number of reasonably regular derived forms (Bauer and Nation, 1993). Some researchers suggest vocabulary sizes larger than these (see Nagy, this volume), but in the well conducted studies (for example, D'Anna, Zechmeister nad Hall, 1991) the differences are mainly the result of differences in what items are included in the count and how a word family is defined.

A small study of the vocabulary growth of non-native speakers in an English medium primary school (Jamieson, 1976) suggests that in such a situation non-native speakers' vocabulary grows at the same rate as native speakers' but that the initial gap that existed between them is not closed. For adult learners of English as a foreign language, the gap between their vocabulary size and that of native speakers is usually very large, with many adult foreign learners of English having a vocabulary size of much less than 5000 word families in spite of having studied English for several years. Large numbers of second language learners do achieve vocabulary sizes that are like those of educated native speakers, but they are not the norm.


This is a joke... a five-year-old knowing 5,000 "word families?" Learning another 1,000 each year? That's nearly three new words a day ("word families" no less).. you've got to be kidding me. I doubt the average person learns more than a hundred new words a year, on average, if even close to that. Dan 18:11, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
Actually I think I have heard a similar number, though I don't remember the source. Also, as a footnote, learning a "word family" wouldn't necessary have to be more difficult than learning a new word; if you know "cat" and "dog" form plural with -s, it wouldn't be too difficult to conclude that "puma" also likely would have a regular plural with a s, or if you know verbs "jump" and "run" forms a regular 2nd person present tense with -s, you could also figure out that the word "meet" likely would follow the same scheme. If the words follow regular schemes, it isn't harder to learn variant forms. 惑乱 分からん 17:08, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Collins, 1994, page 271) states that children are capable of learning a new word every two hours. The numbers here are not out of the ballpark.
Yes but ... to me the linear scale definitely is out of the ballpark :) There's no way that the rate of word-learning I am doing at 2 is equivalent to the rate of word-learning I am doing in university. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was an order of magnitude greater for the 2 year old. That's not to say that the two year old is more capable; just that vocabulary is way down low on the list by the time you are in university. — robbiemuffin page talk 14:51, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
There is so much important information missing in this article, basic information that must be included. I will do some research but much more help is needed. Davido321 11:38, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] About some sudies

I heard there was some studies that made a correlation between the vocabulary of a person and succes in life. Of course I read that from http://www.improvingvocabulary.org/ and I don't know if any of this is true . I'd like someone to investigate this to point out the studies that show this to see if it is founded or not. Z E U S 22:11, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Online utility

Someone have deleted Vocabulary builder from external links. Don't you find that online utility useful for readers of this article? --217.23.199.99 10:47, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Whether a web site is "useful" is not a relevant criterion—Wikipedia is not a web directory. An external link must contain information about the topic that extends what is in the article. —johndburger 12:04, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] active/passive vocabulary internal links

The links for active vocabulary and passive vocabulary lead to pages that redirect to here. I am removing them for now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.168.113.25 (talk) 23:50, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Motor imaging

An anonymous editor added a huge amount of material on "motor imaging". This may deserve to be in Wikipedia in its own article, but does not deserve to be 3/4 of an article on Vocabulary. —johndburger 12:00, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[[Media:ExFailed to parse (lexing error): Insert formula here == [Headline text]['''http://www.example.com link title'''{| class="wikitable" |- <gallery> ! header 1 ! header 2 ! header 3 |- | row 1, cell 1 | row 1, cell 2 | row 1, cell 3 |- | row 2, cell 1 | row 2, cell 2 | row 2, cell 3 </gallery><blockquote> <!-- Block quote --><small><sub>Small Text</sub><sup><br />Superscript text<s><ref>Strike-through text</ref>[[Media:[[Media:Example.ogg]][[Media:[[Media:Example.ogg]][[http://www.example.com link title][[http://www.example.com link title]<blockquote> <blockquote> Block quote </blockquote> </blockquote>]]]]]]</s></sup></small> </blockquote> |}] == ample.ogg]]

What the heck is that?  :) Well, so at this time the entire section on vocabulary "acquisition" is gone. Do we need it? If so go and readd it. In the mean time I have removed the section header since the section was literally empty. — robbiemuffin page talk 15:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] to the Wookie

Please stop with replacing all word that begin "vocab-" with "wocab-". It's funny though :) I was laughing mid way through once I realized there was more than one. — robbiemuffin page talk 22:51, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Justification for merging vocabulary and lexicon articles

First of all, please note that I'm not saying that I disagree with the proposal to merge lexicon and vocabulary articles, but I was wondering if someone might comment on the reasons for that suggestion. I'm currently editing a linguistics document and actually came here because I was hoping to find some direction to help answer the question of whether the terms vocabulary and lexicon are interchangeable (and it seems that I'm not the only one who is interested in that question). They might well be, but was wondering if someone could address both the merits of combining them and of keeping them separate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.81.41.91 (talk) 13:54, 30 May 2008 (UTC)