Average Vocabulary Size Research Articles

The Size of the Native Lithuanian Vocabulary of the 11th Grade Students

The aim of this research was to measure the vocabulary size of native speakers of Lithuanian language attending the 11th grade in small cities and to compare the results with the research conducted in Vilnius schools. This paper aimed to find out whether the place of residence and the gender factor have a statistically significant influence on the size of the vocabulary and discover if any sociolinguistic factors can impact it. The research material consisted of 242 responses given to a sociolinguistic survey and vocabulary size test. T-test and regression analysis were applied in the research.The results of the study indicated that the average vocabulary of an 11th grade student consists of approximately 51,400 lemmas. Vilnius school students have an average vocabulary size of about 52,800 lemmas; the vocabulary size of small towns students is lower – 50,000 lemmas. The T-test statistical analysis has revealed that the difference in the mean size of the vocabulary across genders is statistically significant (p = 0,011). It was found out that the vocabulary size of students living in Vilnius is statistically significantly bigger than that of students in the smaller cities (p = 0,002). The regression analysis indicated that gender can affect the vocabulary size. The analysis showed statistical significance (p = 0,004) that watching movies in the Lithuanian language can impact the vocabulary size of students living in small towns.

English Students’ Vocabulary Size and Level at a Private University in West Java, Indonesia

The research investigated the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) undergraduate students’ vocabulary knowledge (size and level). The research involved 40 second-semester students who were enrolling in two reading courses at an English Department in a private university in West Java, Indonesia. Vocabulary Size Test by Nation and Beglar; and Vocabulary Level Test by Webb, Sasao, and Ballance were used to gain data. It is found that the participants’ average vocabulary size is 8.732,5 word-families. The finding of the research also reveals that only ten students master 1.000-5.000 word-levels. It means that despite a big vocabulary size that many students have, 75% of them only know a limited high and mid-frequency vocabulary. The findings imply that the students still need to read graded readers to master high and mid-frequency levels. The current research project also indicates that the students might have met more low-frequency words than high and mid-frequency words in their language learning prior to their current extensive reading program.

Receptive Vocabulary Size of Male and Female Saudi English Major Graduates

This study measured Saudi university students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge towards the end of their final semester. The subjects were 71 Saudi male and female students. The Vocabulary Levels Test, adopted from Nation’s (2008), was administered in this study. The test assesses learners’ receptive knowledge of word meaning at the following distinct vocabulary levels: the 2nd 1,000-word level, the 3rd 1,000-word level, the 5th 1,000-word level, the 10th 1,000-word level, and the Academic Word List (AWL). The results showed different participants’ performance at different word levels with decreasing mean scores as the frequency of word levels decreased. The results also showed, with no exception, that males outperformed females with statistically significant differences in all the five sections of the test. The participants’ average vocabulary size is approximately 876 and 799 words in the 2nd 1,000-word level, 436 and 355 words in the AWL, 725 and 590 words in the 3rd 1,000-word level, 580 and 477 words in the 5th 1,000-word level for males and females respectively. However, the average vocabulary size decreased dramatically in the 10th 1,000-word level to 254 words for males and 124 for females. Based on these findings, it is concluded that Saudi English Language and Translation university graduates, even with large vocabulary size in the high frequency bands, are generally still below the level of the desired vocabulary competency as EFL learners, and are in fact, in need for more support and concentration in their undergraduate study with regard to their vocabulary learning.

Assessing English Students` Vocabulary Size of Lampung State Islamic University

The aims of this research were to measure the English students’ vocabulary size as well to measure the students’ vocabulary size which was less and more than 1000 words. The research method that the researcher used was quantitative with 209 students as sample. The research instrument was a test which consisted of 79 items. The research findings show the first year students of UIN Raden Intan English department have an average vocabulary size 1400 words. The number of the first year students of UIN Raden Intan English department who have the vocabulary size less than 1000 words is about 11 students or only 6% students. On the other hand, the number of students who have the vocabulary more than 1000 words is about 192 students or 94% students.

Age-Related Differences in Lexical Access Relate to Speech Recognition in Noise.

Vocabulary size has been suggested as a useful measure of “verbal abilities” that correlates with speech recognition scores. Knowing more words is linked to better speech recognition. How vocabulary knowledge translates to general speech recognition mechanisms, how these mechanisms relate to offline speech recognition scores, and how they may be modulated by acoustical distortion or age, is less clear. Age-related differences in linguistic measures may predict age-related differences in speech recognition in noise performance. We hypothesized that speech recognition performance can be predicted by the efficiency of lexical access, which refers to the speed with which a given word can be searched and accessed relative to the size of the mental lexicon. We tested speech recognition in a clinical German sentence-in-noise test at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in 22 younger (18–35 years) and 22 older (60–78 years) listeners with normal hearing. We also assessed receptive vocabulary, lexical access time, verbal working memory, and hearing thresholds as measures of individual differences. Age group, SNR level, vocabulary size, and lexical access time were significant predictors of individual speech recognition scores, but working memory and hearing threshold were not. Interestingly, longer accessing times were correlated with better speech recognition scores. Hierarchical regression models for each subset of age group and SNR showed very similar patterns: the combination of vocabulary size and lexical access time contributed most to speech recognition performance; only for the younger group at the better SNR (yielding about 85% correct speech recognition) did vocabulary size alone predict performance. Our data suggest that successful speech recognition in noise is mainly modulated by the efficiency of lexical access. This suggests that older adults’ poorer performance in the speech recognition task may have arisen from reduced efficiency in lexical access; with an average vocabulary size similar to that of younger adults, they were still slower in lexical access.

Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Arabic Vocabulary Size among Pre-University Students in Malaysia

Vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary size are among the main factors that help determine how students learn second language vocabulary. The present study was an attempt to exploring the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and Arabic vocabulary size of 742 pre-university in Religious High School (SMKA) and Government-Aided Religious School (SABK). TAV test and Schmitt’s (1997) vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire including 5 categories (Determination, Social, Memory, Cognitive and Metacognitive) were used in present study. The major findings of this study were as follows: First, descriptive statistical analyses showed that the most frequent learning strategies was indicated that the most preferred vocabulary learning strategy category of all was related to determination strategies. Social strategies ranked the second. Memory, cognitive and the metacognitive strategies ranked the third to the fifth. Next, pre-university students reported not having the average vocabulary size to accommodate advanced studies at university level. Finally, the findings of the study revealed there was a relationship between the use of vocabulary learning strategies and Arabic vocabulary size.

Receptive Vocabulary Size for Reading English and American Novels

The primary goal of the current study was bi-fold. First it was to estimate the vocabulary size necessary for unassisted comprehension of the English and American novels that were commonly used in the literature courses at the universities in Korea. In addition, it was to measure the receptive vocabulary size of Korean university students and to see how much of a gap there was between the students` vocabulary size and the vocabulary size necessary for the comprehension of novels. A vocabulary analysis of the novels was conducted utilizing Range, one of the most comprehensive lexical analysis tools, and it was found that the receptive vocabulary size necessary for comprehending the novels ranged from 6,000 to 11,000 word families. In addition, the receptive vocabulary size of 189 English majors at two universities was measured drawing on Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar, 2007) and it was revealed that the students` average vocabulary size ranged from 6,400 to 7,400 word families, displaying a relatively large gap between their vocabulary size and the vocabulary size necessary for the comprehension of the novels.

Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Vocabulary Size of ELT Students at EMU in Northern Cyprus

This research study aimed at exploring the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary size of 125 undergraduate English Language Teaching students at Eastern Mediterranean University. This research study was a correlational survey study of descriptive nature. The major findings of this study were as follows. First, the findings indicated that most of the ELT students adequately operated the psycholinguistic strategies, whereas somewhat adequately the metacognitive strategies. Next, the ELT students reportedly had a somewhat average vocabulary size to cope with advanced studies at the university level. Finally, this study found no relationship between the psycholinguistic strategy and the vocabulary size of the participants, and the relationships between the metacognitive strategy and the vocabulary size, as well as the vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and the vocabulary size of the participants were negligible. The findings also revealed that students did not operate certain strategies, rather a variety of strategies.

Children's Development of Self-Regulation in Speech Production

Species-specific vocalizations fall into two broad categories: those that emerge during maturation, independent of experience, and those that depend on early life interactions with conspecifics. Human language and the communication systems of a small number of other species, including songbirds, fall into this latter class of vocal learning. Self-monitoring has been assumed to play an important role in the vocal learning of speech and studies demonstrate that perception of your own voice is crucial for both the development and lifelong maintenance of vocalizations in humans and songbirds. Experimental modifications of auditory feedback can also change vocalizations in both humans and songbirds. However, with the exception of large manipulations of timing, no study to date has ever directly examined the use of auditory feedback in speech production under the age of 4. Here we use a real-time formant perturbation task to compare the response of toddlers, children, and adults to altered feedback. Children and adults reacted to this manipulation by changing their vowels in a direction opposite to the perturbation. Surprisingly, toddlers' speech didn't change in response to altered feedback, suggesting that long-held assumptions regarding the role of self-perception in articulatory development need to be reconsidered.

Defining a Minimal Receptive Second-Language Vocabulary for Non-native University Students: An Empirical Investigation

This study aimed to answer the question of how many words of the Dutch language, and which words, an adult non-native speaker needs to know receptively in order to be able to understand first-year university reading materials. In the first part of this study, an assessment was made of the representativeness of a list of 23,550 words (lemmas), taken from a school dictionary, for a 42 million-word token corpus of contemporary written Dutch. It was found that, using frequency as a criterion, text coverage substantially increased with up to 11,123 words (i.e. words occuring more that 100 times in the corpus), but not beyond. In the second part of the study, an assessment was made of the representativeness of the same list of 23,550 words for a relatively small corpus of first-year university reading materials. The percentage of tokens covered in this small academic corpus did not differ substantially from the percentage of tokens covered in the first part. The third part of the study consisted of the development and administration of a 140-item multiple-choice vocabulary test aimed at measuring test takers' receptive knowledge of 18,615 content words of the 23,550 word list. This test was administered to (i) native speakers entering university as freshmen, (ii) non-native graduate students, and (iii) non-native propective students taking a Dutch language entry examination test battery. Extrapolations of the test scores showed that the average vocabulary size of these three groups of test takers was 18,8000, 15,800, and 11,200 respectively. It is concluded that the minimal vocabulary size needed for university studies is 10,000 base words. Earlier Dutch studies, suggesting that knowledge of 3,000 or 5,000 base words would suffice, appear to have underestimated such a minimal vocabulary.