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.
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