The other day I was doing some ad hoc research for The Stupid Novel, and it spiraled into a morning-long digression into extraneous information gathering or, as I prefer to call it, “creative procrastination.”
It started with the discovery that in 1981 the Japanese Ministry of Education identified 1,945 kanji to be taught in elementary school (jōyō kanji), and it’s generally considered that one would need to know about 2,500 kanji in order to be able to read Japanese newspapers. Being born in the Midwest and educated in American public schools, it never occurred to me to count the number of words I know or to wonder how many I was taught in elementary school. And I got to wondering what the vocabulary size was of the average modern American.
It’s a hard statistic to track down. Our educational system is far less precise than the Japanese one with regard to what vocabulary words are taught in schools, not to mention there’s some disagreement as to what constitutes a “word” (e.g., run, runner, ran, and running are four different words, but they’re all based upon a single core word, “run”). Linguists generally refer to “word families” when discussing vocabulary size, but even with that, what constitutes a word family can get wibbly.
It’s generally accepted that the number of words a person knows is directly related to how much they read (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). According to some estimates, a high school graduate who doesn’t read recreationally knows around 10K word families, a college graduate who habitually reads popular books and magazines knows around 20K word families, and someone with an advanced degree knows around 25K+ word families (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990).
And that made me wonder how the proliferation of blogs, social networking sites, and particularly texting is affecting vocabulary sizes and literacy in general. It’s produced a communication style that sacrifices spelling and punctuation for brevity (e.g., afaik, idk, lol, etc.), but also new literary forms, such as twitter-fiction–stories of 140 characters or less. There are those who contend that text speak is detrimental to language skills, “pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary” (Humphrys, 2007). While others point out that how much the average person engages in written communication has dramatically increased due to the Internet and SMS popularity and claim that this increased exposure to the written word will be beneficial to literacy skills.
It’s still a relatively new topic of research–which is probably just as well, since this scarcity of information curtailed my chain of curiosity–but so far, the data seems to favor the latter camp. In a recent study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers found texting to be positively correlated with better reading skills and greater vocabularies in 10- to 12-year-olds (Plester, Wood, & Joshi, 2009).
I’m glad it seems unlikely that texting will bring about the downfall of literacy and the English language, but now I’m wondering if I should re-write The Stupid Novel in TXT SP3EAK and look for an iPhone publisher.
I did mention I creatively procrastinated a morning away, didn’t I?
Guest blogger Eugie Foster calls home a mildly haunted, fey-infested house in metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew, and her pet skunk, Hobkin. Her publication credits number over 100 and include stories in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Cricket, OSC’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Fantasy Magazine, and anthologies Best New Fantasy (Prime Books), Heroes in Training (DAW Books), and Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 (Juno Books). Her short story collection, Returning My Sister’s Face: And Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, is now out from Norilana Books. Visit her at EugieFoster.com.
Nagy, W.E. and Anderson, R.C. (1984). How many words are there in printed English? Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 304-330.
Goulden, R., Nation, P., and Read, J. (1990). How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics, 11, 341-363.
Humphrys, J. (2007). I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language. Mail Online, Sept. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483511/I-h8-txt-msgs-How-texting-wrecking-language.html)
Plester, B., Wood, C., and Joshi, P. (2009). Exploring the relationship between children’s knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 1, 145-161.
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Hi there,
Interesting, did you plan to continue this article?
Miato