[Corpora-List] Average Daily Word Exposure

[John F. Sowa]

On 8/18/2010 10:12 AM, Ali SH wrote:
> While there doesn't seem to be one conclusive or even complete study,
> piecing together various studies I think gives a pretty good estimate.
> See the second blog post below for a fairly thorough (and sourced!)
> analysis.

I certainly agree with the first line, but I doubt that anyone has
yet reached "a pretty good estimate".  The Human Speechome Project
is an ambitious attempt, but the papers that have been published
so far show that the amount of variation and the number of factors
to be considered is enormous.  See the following list:

    http://web.media.mit.edu/~dkroy/publications/index.html

As just one example of the kinds of issues involved, people once
claimed that exposing infants to TV would increase their exposure
to words and improve their rate of language learning.

Unfortunately, more recent studies have showed the opposite:
an infant's rate of learning language *decreases* with the
amount of exposure to TV.  Far more important than passive
exposure is the emotional involvement of the child with
caregivers and siblings in actively using language.

Trying to count exposure to words is difficult, but the quality
of emotional involvement is far more important and much more
difficult to estimate.

John Sowa

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