Would you read the newspaper if it was all like that? Would you read anything you didn't have to? Most non-readers have difficulty decoding the individual words, but in addition, even if they can decode them, most non-readers do not understand many of the words in formal text.Vocabulary development is a lifelong endeavor, but because of the Matthew Effect, over time, some people develop far richer vocabularies than other people. There have been various attempts to measure how many words adults know, and the estimates vary widely. Part of the reason is that it is not clear what it means to "know" a word. Speaking personally, there are some words I am much more familiar with than others.Consider these words: WHITE, DOG, and HOMEAnd compare them to these words: CALLIOPE, FOP, and BRACHIALI don't know about you, but while I am certain that I "know" the first group of words, I would only say that I recognize and have some limited knowledge of the second group of words. Dale and O'Rourke (1986) described four levels of word knowledge, which they characterized with four statements:1. I never saw the word before2. I've heard of it, but I don't know what it means3. I recognize it in context, and I can tell you what it is related to4. I know the word wellIt is hard to say how many words I know well, much less how many words I'm somewhat or vaguely familiar with. Also, estimating the number of words a person knows depends on what counts as a word. If DRIVE, DRIVER, DRIVES, DRIVEN, and DRIVING all count as separate words, then the estimate would be considerably larger. Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) created a database of English words that appear in print by counting the number of occurrences of every string of letters that was separated by a space on each side (they sampled some 5,000,000 words from a variety of published texts). They came up with 86,741 unique "words," but, because a computer did the counting, every unique letter string was counted as a separate word -- DRIVE, DRIVER, DRIVES, DRIVEN, and DRIVING were all counted as separate words. Also, because a computer did the counting, misspelled words were counted (this was 1971 -- before spell-checking), and things that we would not recognize as words were also counted (e.g. "G787" and "FI--"). Toss out the misspelled and nonsense words, and you are closer to 50,000 unique "words."
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