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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

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          Abstract

          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 shallow as knowing that the word exists. In addition, people learn tens of thousands of inflected forms and proper nouns (names), which account for the substantially high numbers of ‘words known’ mentioned in other publications.

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          Most cited references25

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          Introduction to Information Retrieval

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            Wuggy: a multilingual pseudoword generator.

            Pseudowords play an important role in psycholinguistic experiments, either because they are required for performing tasks, such as lexical decision, or because they are the main focus of interest, such as in nonword-reading and nonce-inflection studies. We present a pseudoword generator that improves on current methods. It allows for the generation of written polysyllabic pseudowords that obey a given language's phonotactic constraints. Given a word or nonword template, the algorithm can quickly generate pseudowords that match the template in subsyllabic structure and transition frequencies without having to search through a list with all possible candidates. Currently, the program is available for Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Basque, and, with little effort, it can be expanded to other languages.
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              How Large a Vocabulary is Needed For Reading and Listening?

              I. Nation (2006)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                29 July 2016
                2016
                : 7
                : 1116
                Affiliations
                [1]Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium
                Author notes

                Edited by: Manuel Perea, University of Valencia, Spain

                Reviewed by: Michael S. Vitevitch, University of Kansas, USA; Pablo Gomez, DePaul University, USA; Cristina Izura, Swansea University, UK

                *Correspondence: Marc Brysbaert, marc.brysbaert@ 123456ugent.be

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116
                4965448
                27524974
                fa52bb06-4c8e-4801-88ba-c66fb82dcdf2
                Copyright © 2016 Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera and Keuleers.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 10 February 2016
                : 12 July 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 4, Equations: 1, References: 43, Pages: 11, Words: 0
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                word knowledge,vocabulary size,reading
                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                word knowledge, vocabulary size, reading

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