| CHILDREN'S VOCABULARIES. |
By M. C. and H. GALE,
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.
THE philological legend that the vocabulary of a workingman is only about 300 words[1] should show proof why it should not go the way of all legends when it is found that a child of two and a half or even two years uses by actual count from 600 to 800 different words in one day. Has anybody really estimated or counted the words used by a workingman; if so, what method has been used? A physician and father was asked to guess how many different words were used by our three children up to two and a half years of age, either in common or by any one of them. He gave vent to emphatic protests of incredulity when his guess of 'about 200' was met by the actual number of 2,170. And we ourselves have found several times that, after following a child about all day with pad and pencil and taking down all his talk for a waking day till we were almost exhausted, when we then tried to make an estimate of the words used we have only come to within a quarter to a half of the right number. This illusive underestimation of a child's vocabulary is so universal that it can only be corrected by cataloguing, indexing and actually counting the words thus recorded for a whole day. In the following table are given the different words and the total number of words used by two of our children on the day they were each two and a half years old:
| Different words. | Total words. | |||
| 2 (boy). | 3 (girl). | 2 (boy). | 3 (girl). | |
| Nouns | 369 | 307 | 3367 | 2168 |
| Verbs | 189 | 165 | 2200 | 2048 |
| Adjectives | 83 | 79 | 729 | 1327 |
| Adverbs | 42 | 38 | 1314 | 1031 |
| Interjections | 8 | 8 | 113 | 198 |
| Pronouns | 27 | 15 | 678 | 761 |
| Prepositions | 21 | 14 | 636 | 405 |
| Articles and Conjunctions | 14 | 3 | 253 | 54 |
| Totals | 751 | 629 | 9290 | 8992 |
It is interesting to find from the complete tables[2] that of the 751
- ↑ See e. g. Max Müller: 'Science of Language,' First Series, 1870. "Now we are told on good authority, by a country clergyman, that some of the laborers in this parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary" (p. 226).
- ↑ See the authors' complete vocabularies, tables and discussion in their article 'The vocabularies of three children in one family to two and a half years of age,' 'Psychological Studies,' edited by Harlow Gale.
