Speaking and writing: Distinct patterns of word choice

Abstract

Natural conversations and popular television shows provide sufficient lexical diversity for children to develop novice levels of lexical expertise, but they are ill-suited for developing the higher levels of such expertise. In large part, this is due to distinct patterns of word choice in speaking and writing. Those patterns are revealed in a half-million word corpus, designed to represent all major language sources (print, television, and conversation). Each sample text is first compared against a common 10,000-type reference lexicon. This permits comparisons between texts from different language sources. The pattern of word choice in most printed texts is described by a simple linear equation, but conversations are fit by one or another cubic equation. Linear and S-curve texts differ in their relative use of the major articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and most other function words, as well as the more common and rarer content words. The ranking of the 10 most common function words is uncorrelated in the two patterns. Consequently, conversations between college graduates more closely resemble a preschool child's speech to its parents than texts from newspapers. Implications of the linear and S-curved patterns for models of lexical acquisition are considered.