[Corpora-List] estimates of written/spoken input

[Marco Baroni]

Dear all,

Does anybody  know of studies that present estimates of how many words (or 
sentences, or utterances, etc.) an "average" adult human being hears and/or 
reads during a certain time span (days, months, years, etc.)? I realize 
that this is problematic (what is a word? who counts as "average adult"? in 
which anguage? etc.), but I would be happy even with very rough ballpark 
estimates.

I am interested in this because I would like to know to what extent a 
corpus the size of the BNC (or even larger) can be seen (of course, again, 
with all sorts of methodolocial caveats) as a surrogate for the amount of 
linguistic input that the average adult human receives in a certain period 
of time...

I am aware of an estimate that fifth-graders read about 1M words per year 
(quoted in Anglin: Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis 
(Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1993) -- I 
don't have the book with me right now, so I could be wrong regarding the 
grade and/or the amount of words...), but I've found nothing about adults.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Marco

-- 
Marco Baroni
SSLMIT, University of Bologna
http://sslmit.unibo.it/~baroni