According to the UK “communications czar,” Jean Gross, teenagers have an average daily vocabulary of only 800 words.
In January, Gross issued a statement claiming that this problem is due to the high consumption of television and other electronic media. She said having a limited vocabulary could negatively affect teenager’s chances of getting a job.
Kaitlin Johnson, a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Minnesota, was unable to find the original study Gross refers to. This raises concerns, as being published in peer reviewed journals is necessary for a claim to have scientific merit. In the information presented in newspapers, though, she sees a few flaws. For one thing, there is no “comparison” given, meaning that people are not told the daily vocabulary size of other populations, such as college students or working adults.
However, she said that if it is true that teenagers only use 800 words a day, it might not be a negative reflection of teenage vocabulary.
“Even if it is true, I still don’t believe that it is necessarily a bad thing or a shocking thing,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that this is an example of a “large scale confirmation bias,” where people favor information that confirms their biases. People might already have complaints and concerns about “kids these days” and a decline in cognitive capability due to technology, so they are eager to find a problem with teenagers’ vocabulary.
David Crystal, who is an honorary professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, wrote a blog entry on his website about the 800 word claim. He maintains it is “silly” and said that “it's nonsense for anyone to suggest that teenagers have a lexicon of 800 words.”
He wrote that he usually gets a picture of a person’s average daily vocabulary by having them go through a dictionary to mark their active vocabulary, the words they think they use, as well as their passive vocabulary, the words they know. He has “rarely found estimates of adult active vocabulary falling below 40,000 words, and usually they are in excess of 50,000.”
When he performed this experiment with “mid-teenagers,” he found that they always had an active vocabulary of at least 20,000 words, and usually used many more than this.
South teachers have mixed opinions about vocabulary decline in teenagers.
English teacher Phylis Hayes said she has seen a vocabulary decline. She said this is less significant in discussions but in “academic writing, kids being prepared to go to college, I think the decrease in vocabulary is a detriment.”
Hayes tries to increase her student’s vocabulary by identifying “informal language” in papers to encourage them to use more advanced vocabulary. In the past few years, she has started creating vocabulary lists for her AP English classes.
English teacher Carol Horswill said in her 47 years of teaching she has seen a change in vocabulary, but she doesn’t consider it to be a decline. She said vocabulary has always changed as “society changes.”
Horswill said that the vocabulary change does present challenges in her class when students read older texts. “It makes it more difficult to access knowledge from the past.”
Both Hayes and Horswill said that new technology like the internet takes time away that could be spent reading, which could affect vocabulary. Horswill admitted that time spent on technology today is time “you might have spent 100 years ago reading a book.”
Hayes said she has always taught during the “television generation,” but “now we have the internet and iPod, and all kinds of other technology that keep people from reading extensively… I think more reading [leads to] more vocabulary.”