VOCABULARY OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN CLASSROOM SPEECHES

摘要

A sample totaling 300,000 words from classroom speeches by men of college age yielded fewer than 7,000 different words. The vocabulary follows the general pattern of similar vocabularies taken from printed sources, for example Dewey's and Thorndike's. However, there are notable exceptions. Some of Thorndike's most frequent 500 words do not appear in the sample. Shannon showed that Zipf's pre¬diction formula for the occurrence of words fitted Dewey's data reasonably well. The formula when applied to the present vocabulary indicated overuse of the words of rank order 10 through 400.