[Corpora-List] Average Daily Word Exposure

[Jim Fidelholtz]

Hi, Ali,

Your question is apt and timely, but difficult to answer. I assume that
'sees' and 'reads' is just a slip (?read 'writes' for 'reads'?).
Incidentally, I don't know offhand of any work on the following issue, but I
assume (from the wording of yr question, I assume that you do too, actually)
the crucial aspects of the answer are the *exposure* (hears, reads) rather
than the use (writes, speaks), the latter being more practice than exposure
(ok, it's also secondarily exposure, too). As many researchers have pointed
out over the last half-century, especially, even the same person is exposed
at different times to very different genres of the same language, and we
know that changing genres may greatly affect the distribution of word
frequencies.

That is, you can't really get a reliable picture of the *daily* exposure,
even of an individual, and much less of a group, since unpredictable changes
in (word) fashion, general interest stories on the news, etc., can affect
frequencies (just one obvious example: the *total* frequency of 'HIV' plus
its expanded version before about 1980 was *0*, while now it is fairly
common). Likewise, there are well-known differences between aural and visual
(spoken and read) reception, namely that, roughly, the spoken lexicon is
smaller than the written one, with the more (respectively, less) common
words even more (resp., less) common in speech than in writing.

I don't really have at hand any good references to answer your question,
though I'm sure that others will answer you with concrete studies, which
*do* exist. (eg, the answer you received while I was writing this).

One fairly well-established fact: of the very most common words (say, the
first couple dozen or so), their relative distribution stays pretty constant
over different genres (but note: even here, if you examine, say, headlines
and billboards and the like, these 'function words' may drop drastically in
frequency).

Jim

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Ali SH
<asaegyn+out at gmail.com<asaegyn%2Bout at gmail.com>
> wrote:

> Hi Guys,
>
> I have a quick question. I'm wondering if anyone can point me towards
> studies which have looked at any one or combination of the average number of
> words that a person:
>
>    - hears
>    - sees
>    - reads
>    - speaks
>
> on a daily basis.
>
> I'm generally interested in the overall word daily *exposure* (I don't
> care if the words have been processed, just picked up by the relevant
> auditory / visual cortices ), though if there are studies that focus on
> processed words that's fine.
>
> The main "sources" I've found are via:
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/sex_on_the_brain/
> which focus on words spoken. And as that article notes (and I've confirmed
> for the studies I've been able to track down), almost none of those
> "sources" actually cite or indicate how the word count was derived.
>
> This question is motivated by the BNC's 100 million word corpus. How many
> months / years of word exposure is that for your "average" North American(?)
> adult?
>
> Thank you kindly,
> Ali Hashemi
>
> --
> www.reseed.ca
> www.pinkarmy.org
>
> (•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,.,
>
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
>


-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20100817/d23c5ceb/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora