How many words do we know? We all have the intuition that our vocabulary cannot be too enormous since we don’t remember having to learn a lot of words.
Yet when we think about it, we realize that the world around us appears to be infinite in scope. How do we use a finite vocabulary to deal with potential infinite number of situations we encounter in the world? Our vocabulary also has an open-endedness that contributes to our creative use of language.
Researcher said that children just entering school “command 13,000 word. A typical high school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”
This number (120,000) may appear to be large, but think of example of all the people and all the places (streets, cities, countries, etc) can be name. In sum, any one who has mastered a language has mastered an astonishingly long list of facts encoded in the form of words. The list of words for any language (though not complete list) is referred to as its ‘lexicon’.
When we think about our native language, the existence of words seems obvious. After all, when we hear others speaking our native language we hear them uttering words. In reading a printed message, we see words on the page neatly separated by spaces.
But now imagine yourself in a situation where everyone around you is speaking a foreign language that you have just started to study. Suddenly the existence of words no longer seems obvious.
While listening to a native speaker of French, or Navajo or Japanese, all you hear is a blur of sound, as you strain to recognized words you have learned. If only the native speaker would slow down a little, you would be able to divide that blur of sound into individual words.
The physical reality of speech is that for the most part the signal is continuous, with no breaks at all between words. The ability to analyze a continuous stream of sound (spoken language) into discrete units is far from trivial and it constitutes a central part of language comprehension. When you have mastered language, you are being able to recognized individual words without effort.
Concept of Language
