How Large a Vocabulary is Needed For Reading and Listening?
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No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Abstract
This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what vocabulary size is needed for unassisted comprehension of written and spoken English. The trialling showed that the lists were properly sequenced and there were no glaring omissions from the lists. If 98% coverage of a text is needed for unassisted comprehension, then a 8,000 to 9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for comprehension of written text and a vocabulary of 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Canadian Modern Language Review/ La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes
- Topic
- Second Language Acquisition and Learning
- Field
- Psychology
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- University of Cambridge
- Keywords
- VocabularyReading comprehensionComputer scienceActive listeningLinguisticsWord (group theory)Reading (process)ComprehensionNatural language processingArtificial intelligenceListening comprehensionPsychologyCommunication
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes