How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age
Marc Brysbaert, Michaël Stevens, Paweł Mandera, Emmanuel Keuleers · 2016
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출처 Brysbaert et al. (2016), Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1116 · 라이선스 CC BY 4.0 · 원문
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7장 · How Many Lemmas and Word Families are Known According to the Literature?
When we look at the various attempts to estimate the vocabulary size of an adult (typically an undergraduate student), we clearly see the impact of the various definitions given to “words” (Table 3). Nearly all estimates limit words to lemmas, as defined above. In addition, most make some further reduction by using various definitions of “word families.” As a result, the estimates range from less than 10 thousand words known to over 200 thousand words mastered.
Unsurprisingly, the highest number comes from a study (Hartmann, 1946) in which no pruning of lemmas (or inflections) was done. Hartmann (1946) selected 50 words (one from the same relative position on every fortieth page) from the unabridged Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary (second edition) and administered the words to 106 undergraduate students. The participants were asked to supply the meanings of the words without time limit. Given that the dictionary contained 400 thousand words and the students on average were able to give definitions for 26.9 of the 50 words, Hartmann concluded that they had a vocabulary of 215,000 words. As we saw above, this estimate includes proper nouns, inflected forms, derived words and compounds.
Goulden et al. (1990) also started from (a later edition of) Webster’s International Dictionary but reduced the number of “interesting words” to the 54,000 base words discussed above. They selected 250 of these words and presented lists of 50 to a total of 20 university graduates, who were native speakers of English and over the age of 22. Students simply had to indicate whether they knew the word. The estimated number of basic words known ranged from 13,200 to 20,700 with an average of 17,200.
Milton and Treffers-Daller (2013) used the same words as Goulden et al. (1990) but asked participants to give a synonym or explanation for each word they knew. Participants were mainly first year university students. With this procedure and population Milton and Treffers-Daller (2013) obtained an estimate of 9,800 word families known.
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