CHILDREN'S VOCABULARIES. 45 



CHILDREN'S VOCABULARIES. 



By M. C. and H. GALE, 



UNIVERSITY OP MINNESOTA. 



THE philological legend that the vocabulary of a workingman is 

 only about 300 words* 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 wak- 

 ing 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: 



Nouns 

 Verbs 



Adjectives 

 Adverbs 

 Interjections 

 Pronouns 

 Prepositions 



Articles and Conjunctions 14 3 253 54 



Totals 751 629 9290 8992 



It is interesting to find from the complete tablesf that of the 751 



* See e. g. Max Miiller: ' Science of Language,' First Series, 1870. "Now 

 we are told on good authority, by a country clergyman, tliat some of the laborers 

 in this parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary" (p. 226). 



t 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. 



