A VOCABULARY TEST i57 



A VOCABULARY TEST 



By Professor E. A. KIRKPATR1CK 



FITCHBURG STATE NORMAL SCHOOL 



OF all the inventions of the human race nothing compares in im- 

 portance, as regards mental development, with language. In 

 the development of each person also, nothing exercises a greater in- 

 fluence in molding and developing thought and feeling than his 

 language environment. The vocabulary of a person represents in a 

 condensed and symbolic form all that he has experienced and imagined. 

 The breadth of his mental experience is indicated by the number of 

 words that have for him a meaning, while the accuracy of his thinking 

 is shown by the constancy and exactness of meaning with which he 

 uses words. The study of vocabularies ought therefore to be an im- 

 portant branch of psychological investigation. 



Studies have been made of the number of words used by great 

 writers, and by children a few years old. The latter studies have 

 shown that a child may not use words that are perfectly familiar to 

 him for months merely because he has no occasion to use them, e. g., 

 words frequently uttered in the summer or when in the country may 

 never be used in the city or in the winter. Adults are familiar with 

 many words that they have rarely, perhaps never, used. The difficul- 

 ties in the way of counting accurately the number of words used by 

 an adult or even by a child over three years of age are almost insur- 

 mountable. 



When we attempt to estimate the number of words that have a 

 meaning for an individual, the difficulties are less although the num- 

 ber of words is much greater. The writer long ago estimated the 

 number of words in his own vocabulary by going carefully through 

 an unabridged dictionary and counting the number of familiar words 

 on every tenth page (see Science, 0. S., Vol. XVIII., pp. 107-108). 

 Since then he has often had his students estimate the number of con- 

 cepts that they possessed by counting the number of words that had 

 for them a fairly definite meaning, on a few pages of the dictionary, 

 and then calculating from the proportion of familiar words the total 

 number of words they knew. 



When a student began, say on page 2, and counted all the words 

 in bold-faced type and the number of these known on every fiftieth 

 page, and then did the same beginning with page 20, the results were 



