[Corpora-List] estimates of written/spoken input

[Paul Bennett]

Geoffrey Pullum and Barbara Scholze (in Linguistic Review 19, 2002, p44) cite
evidence that by the age of three a child in a professional household might
have heard 30 million word tokens (but far fewer for children in other social
classes). I know this relates to children rather than adults, but presumably
the amount of language heard does not differ much by age.

Their source is B. Hart and T. Risley: Meaningful Differences in the Everyday
Experiences of Young Children (Paul H Brookes, 1995). I haven't read this, but
I guess this would be a place to look for more information.

Paul Bennett


> 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.