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.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Brysbaert M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4965448 | biostudies-literature | 2016
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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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.
Brysbaert Marc M Stevens Michaël M Mandera Paweł P Keuleers Emmanuel E
Frontiers in psychology 20160729
Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days. The knowledge of the words can be as sha ...[more]
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