How many words does a person hear in a day?

It’s probably hard to quantify but based on what people do, what kind of work they’re engaged in, what they do in their free time would change things.

If someone sits on a couch and plays video games, for example, and never watches the news, they are likely to hear less vocabulary words than someone that goes to work and speaks to others often. Likewise, someone that works in a fast food restaurant is likely to hear less vocabulary words than someone that runs a hedge fund (just some examples). So it’s pretty logical but of course there are many exceptions and anybody could find exceptions to anything.

I agree with @jca Too many factors to factor in to attain any sort of average. Does hearing your own words count? haha
I live on a rural property and I might only hear or speak a few words a day on days I am home hanging out. I might only say “Hi” to the neighbors or talk to the cats and horses.

My Grandmother was very hard of hearing until she was about 25, then became stone deaf. After she died, my grandfather came to live with us. He had acquired a very active habit of talking to himself, my mom said it was because he had gone so long without anyone to talk to.

I don’t think the number is at all wrong. My ex and I engaged our kids in conversation from the time they got up until they went to bed.

It sounds very possible to me. I wonder if poor families are more likely to have single parent homes? That can mean less conversation between adults in the house that children might only hear and not participate in, but they still are around the conversation. It also might mean the child has fewer hours with a parent in the home.

Among poor people they are probably more likely to be less educated, more likely to have mental illness, and less curious about the world. I absolutely do not mean that poor people are assumed to have any of these traits, I’m only saying statistically among the poor you might find this more often. The poor might be likely to be more religious, and in America that means more religious Christians, and poor, very religious Christians are probably more likely to buy into children should be seen and not heard and not question their parents. I think money and education changes how people interact with their children even if they do have some mental illness, are less educated, etc.

My husband’s parents don’t have high school diplomas, but had money, putting them in the upper classes in his country, but they don’t debate topics are have interests and curiousity like my parents did about so many things in life. This does affect how much is discussed in general and at the dinner table. His parents aren’t stupid, but they have a narrower variety of topics they talk about. Add in that in my culture they talk about things more openly affecting them, they carry less shame, while his family has more worry about that sort of thing, and they are more stiff upper lip and silent treatment oriented during disagreements. My husband wasn’t poor at all growing up, he had way more than me, but socio-economically if they were in America they would be classified differently with the same income. They still had somewhat of a poor mentality. Also, they had a TV in the dining area where they typically ate, my parents didn’t allow TV during dinner when we were young.

My dad grew up poor and his house was almost void of conversation and it was awful for him. He felt extremely neglected. His dad was mentally ill and somewhat hard of hearing.

I’m not sure why it matters how many words parents expose their children to. Parents don’t have a lot of influence over their children’s language acquisition.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4514

Oh, but they do @morphail. No matter what is taught in school in language and English classes, children grow up to talk like their parents. My husband is an example of this. He says things like, “He’s went,” and “I seen….” even though he knows better (plus I remind him….) Well, that’s how his family talks.
I have often wondered how people I went to school with, who sat beside in me in English classes, had the same teachers and the same lessons as me, can’t put a grammatically correct sentence together to save their life! What I find is that people who are more meticulous in their speech had parents who stayed on them and actively corrected them.

If parents influenced their children’s language a lot, then why do children of non-native English speakers acquire native English accents? Parents probably do influence their children’s language, but not as much as people seem to think.

Also, many studies show that explicit correction of children’s grammar doesn’t work.

This is from D McNeill. 1966. “Developmental Psycholinguistics” in F Smith and GA Millers The Genesis of Language:

Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me.”
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
[... Eight repetitions of this dialogue…]
Mother: No, now listen carefully; say “nobody likes me.”
Child: Oh! Nobody don’t like me.

@morphail Like I said, my dad felt neglected because there was very little conversation in the house. It had a lot of negative consequences. One is, as a parent he didn’t shut up, still doesn’t. He was exhausting for us as children and he still is he went to the opposite extreme. Incredibly needy for interaction.

I have no idea how many words other people hear daily. I imagine they hear more if they live in the city than if they live in the country.

As for myself, I often go days without hearing the words of others, sometimes weeks, especially if I’m sailing. (This, in my opinion, is one of the benefits of long distance sailing). It’s so nice to not be involved, passively or otherwise, in the cacophony of voices out there—the mad and maddening crowd, so to speak. So much of it is meaningless, repetitive, narcistic and as neurotic as a Seinfeld episode.

I don’t hear a lot of originality anymore. I hear people mostly repeating what they’ve heard on TV news, or talk radio or some idiotic sitcom, or on the net—repeating stupid little soundbites and adages mean for specific circumstances but now generalized and used as references—and somehow think it is all so cool and meaningful. And so much of it is snarky and hostile these days. Not having to hear this on a daily basis makes what little I choose to hear more meaningful. Solitude is incredibly rewarding. In compensation, I read a lot. Reading allows me to examine the source, scan and decide quickly if I value the opinion. I am discriminating.

Even as my hearing fades from decades of being too close to the amps, I choose not to get a hearing aid. I see no value in most of what is said out there.

^^You made me think with your answer, and I’m
Not sure it’s only about the spoken word, but communication in general. I would think sign language counts. Although, maybe there is a physical need for sound like touch? I don’t know.

The need for communication might explain children obsessed with social media and texting. I know it partly explains why I am addicted to Fluther. Not enough conversational interaction at home so I seek it elsewhere.

Women need more conversation than men statistically, so straight marriages can have difficulty I think, unless the wife has a job that has a lot of talking, or she has children, or she has friends she talks to a lot, or she is on social media.

@morphail It’s time for time out for that kid.

@JLeslie I agree. I recognize the need for women to have a social life. It is one of the things I like and envy about them. And it is also why I would never want to inflict my lifestyle on one of them. I am sure it would drive them mad. I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone.

@Dutchess_III no, the parent needs to stop wasting time trying to correct their child’s language. All children make these sorts of errors, and some children are explicitly corrected and some aren’t, and yet all children eventually abandon those errors.

You might say that children do end up saying “I seen” – but that’s part of their dialect. That’s not a mistake in the same way “nobody don’t like me” is a mistake.

I completely disagree with you @morphail. “I seen” is not a dialect, it’s plain bad grammar, passed on from the parents to the children. It’s part of the parent’s job to make sure their kids speak correctly, just like it’s the parent’s job to see to it that they learn manners.

If a kid insists on saying “Nobody don’t like me,” even after they’ve been corrected many times, they’re just playing games, pushing buttons. As I said, “Time out.”

Having said that, my kids, like all kids, put their own spin on some words, pronouncing them incorrectly. I never really corrected them, because I knew they’d get it right on their own eventually. Some of them I even adopted for myself because they were cute. My granddaughter used to say “squirred,’ for “squirrel.” I still use that word. But I’ll never forget when, about a year later, I used the word when I was talking to that same kid. She looked at me oddly and said, “It’s ‘squirrel.”
Same kid corrected her mother at a restaurant when she was about 10 when her mother (my daughter) said, “Me and you are going to get some ice cream!”
My granddaugher said, “It’s you and I, Mother!” :D

Ha ha! Classic in my family: My grandson was talking to me when he was about 5. His aunt and uncle (my other two kids) were there. He said, “Me and Grammpa went fishing…”
I said, “Grammpa and I went fishing….”
He looked at me curiously and said, seriously, “No, you weren’t there.”
Everybody just rolled! I was never able to correct them after that because they’d just say, “No, you weren’t there.” SMH!

Parental conversation in the house is important. Always talk to a child in adult language (i.e. the grammar, elocution and pronunciation you wish them to speak later) and patiently answer any questions they have. Never use baby talk or talk down to your kids, never dumb down. Kids mimic their parent’s language. My experience has been that kids speak like their parents do. As teens and adults, the worse the grammar in the household, the more difficult it is for them to get decent grades in English and Composition.

Yep @Espiritus_Corvus.

My father was raised in a tiny Texas town. His dad was the Sheriff. He got his EE degree at Texas Tech via the GI bill. As he started moving in more professional worlds he deliberately worked on dropping his southern accent, and forced him self to not use words like, “Ain’t.” He probably wouldn’t have made it to the top of the management food chain at Boeing if he hadn’t.

My Mom’s parents barely spoke English. They were immigrants from Holland.

Both of my parents insisted on proper word usage and grammar.

@Dutchess_III “seen” as the simple past of “see” certainly is part of southern American English and Appalachian English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English
It’s not part of standard English, but it’s not a mistake in the context of that speech community.

This is a very different sort of thing than the mistakes that children make with language and that they eventually grow out of. And if explicit correction actually worked, I would expect some children to not grow out of them (because not all children are corrected but all children make mistakes). But children eventually self correct their mistakes, whether they are explicitly corrected or not.

@Dutchess_III LoL. This reminds me of when my Swedish wife, who had the most beautiful and soft British accent (because her English teachers were all English) came home from work one night after a couple of months of living in the interior of Florida and used the word “ain’t”. I swear to god I almost died. I’m a southerner in many ways, but this really threw me. I hid my astonishment because I didn’t want to make too much of an imprint on this. After I caught my breath, I patiently gave her pretty much the same gentle lecture my mother (a cotton pickin’ Texan from the Depression era who dispensed with her “Okie” accent in order to stop the bullying she experienced at her new school in California) gave me on all the connotations this word represented. I added that people who used this word in the US are not to be judged harshly, but it did not at all represent her educational background and could hurt in interviews. She was a nurse anesthetist. I never heard her use that word again, except once when she used it purposely just to freak me out. I fell for it and she got quite a laugh out of it.

@morphail They correct their pronunciation, usually, but not their bad grammar, if they were raised to speak that way, or, as in my Dad’s case, they actively work to correct it after they’re grown.
Correction does work, unless the child has some sort of disability. Example works best of all, though.
My favorite thing to do, if the toddler came up with a cuss word, like, “damn!” was to say, “It’s ‘darn.’ The darn thing broke.” They were at the age where I was correcting them often any way, so they accepted it. It was a gentle and passive way to stop them from using harsh cuss words.

I had no idea you were married @Espiritus_Corvus! My Dad’s accent would slip out sometimes if he was tired and frustrated with us. “Now why did you do that?” It’s hard to explain the accent, the distinct twang and whang and whine on the “why.”
Other times he’d say, jokingly, “I’m going to beat you s’verely ‘bout the head and shoulders!”

What is surely more important than the number of words is the nature of those words, the tone in which they are spoken and the sense (or lack of it) that they make when put together. I would doubt if the figure quoted is accurate if you take into account what poorer children hear on television and what is spoken among themselves. What is at least as important is exposure to the written word and the differences here may be even greater.

@Dutchess_III Yep. 20 good years in harness. Was released back into the wild coming on ten years now. We are best friends.

That’s nice @Espiritus_Corvus.

@Dutchess_III you still haven’t explained why, if explicit correction works, all the mistakes that children make, like “broked” for “broke” or “nobody don’t like me” – why these do not end up becoming part of the adult’s language.

…Because they’re corrected @morphail.

@Dutchess_III So every single child who makes a mistake is explicitly corrected every time? I don’t believe that.

From Formal Principles of Language Acquisition (1983):

It is therefore necessary to ask if negative information is in fact available to a language learner. It is clear that parents do not simply labeled nonsentences to children in a systematic manner; no parents (or other speakers) say “Here is a sentence, and it is ungrammatical, and here is another one, and it is ungrammatical, and here is a third, which is grammatical.” Even as a first step in looking for the existence of negative information we have to turn to the concept of correction, the concept that when the child produces an ungrammatical sentence, he is somehow informed that the sentence is somehow ungrammatical. The child will have to have some abilities of preanalysis in which some kind of event is translated into the information that the sentence he has spoken is ungrammatical. If some event can result in the learner’s deciding that a sentence is ungrammatical , we can call this negative information. Of course this interpretation is consistent with the general need for preanalysis.

The question therefore becomes: Is the child corrected when he produces an ungrammatical sentence? (37) In the opinion of those who have studied the corpuses of of children’s speech, there seems to be very little of this kind of feedback. [...] Brown and Hanlon (1970) analyzed a corpus of mother-child interactions and measured the proportion of nonapproval responses of the mother to “primitive” (ungrammatical) and to well-formed expressions of the child, and found no significant difference between the two proportions; mothers did not differentially disapprove grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Brown and Hanlon also considered the possibility that a more subtle process of correction was going on than approval or disapproval, namely, that the child was understood more readily when he uttered a grammatical sentence than when he uttered a primitive sentence. In other words, the learner would have to translate noncomprehension by the listener into into an assumption that his sentence was ungrammatical. To examine this question Brown and Hanlon measured the proportion of times that mothers produced comprehending responses to grammatical and primitive sentences and again found no significant differences. Mothers seemed to understand ungrammatical sentences about as well as grammatical ones. The investigators pointed out that, in fact, what parents correct are semantic mistakes, not syntactic ones.

This evidence is only partial, of course. For example, it might be that mothers try especially hard to understand children’s utterances, whereas other adults and children differentially understand grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. There is much room for empirical research on these questions, but Slobin (1972) claims that in the many societies the Berkeley group has studied there is no evidence that children are corrected for ungrammatical utterances. Pp.64–65.

——-

Notes.

37. Even if the child is corrected, there is no reason to believe that he takes note of the correction in a way useful for language acquisition. Consider the mother-child interaction reported in McNeill (1966, 69):

Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me.”
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
[... Eight repetitions of this dialogue…]
Mother: No, now listen carefully; say “nobody likes me.”
Child: Oh! Nobody don’t like me.

OK.Whatever you say @morphail. I just told you how I corrected my own children and I know for a fact that it absolutely did work. I can’t speak for anyone else.

Language acquisition is so darn cool. I remember when one my my grandkids started talking…she was like Helen Keller. At some point it hit her that everything had a name, and she’d go around pointing at things, then repeating what you said. Once she was sitting on my lap at a restaurant, touched my plate, looked up at me and said, “Plate?”
I said, “Yes, that is a plate!”
She smiled. She was proud of herself.
That bit of intense discovery only lasted about a couple of weeks. During that time her vocabulary just exploded.

What’s amazing about language acquisition is that everyone in a speech community acquires the same language regardless of their upbringing or intelligence, and the language is largely acquired before we start school. @Dutchess_III Of course you had an influence on your children’s choice of words, but the evidence suggests your influence did not extend to influencing their acquisition of regular past tense forms or negative formation.

Yes, it did. “It’s not ‘goed.’ It’s ‘went.’ We went to the store.” There. It’s corrected.

Of course we all acquire the same language. That’s not exactly profound. Whether individuals learn to use it properly is a different story.

@Dutchess_III And because you corrected your children, and the corrections had an effect, everyone else successfully corrected their children, and that’s why no one says “goed”.
That’s like saying “Jellybeans prevent cancer, because I eat jellybeans every day and I’ve never got cancer.”
I’m not an expert in language acquisition, I’m just repeating what the experts say. Read what I quoted above. The research shows that most children are not explicitly corrected when they produce ungrammatical utterances. Therefore, explicit correction can’t work, because it hardly ever happens.

Many adults do not speak with grammatical correctness, either, because they weren’t corrected, for what ever reason. Facebook is rife with the ignorance of it.

When the kids were little I remember my ex saying, “Raising kids isn’t something you think about! It’s just something you do!” Pretty sure that’s the attitude of many parents out there.

If the parents don’t correct the kids because the parents think the incorrect speech is ok, or because the parents don’t care, or because the parents talk that way themselves, then the kids grow up thinking that saying things like “I seen her at the store” is acceptable, or “I ain’t” is acceptable, or “he be in his car” is acceptable.

No, if I think “I seen” is acceptable, it is because it is part of my dialect, and my teachers didn’t teach me about register and how it is appropriate to use “I saw” in some contexts.

@morphail: Ok, we disagree.

Good parents are aware of how speech patterns can cause others to view them or their kids. Speech patterns can affect job opportunities. If a parent doesn’t take the time to instill proper speech patterns in their children they are doing their kids a disservice, just as surely as if they don’t teach them manners or to chew with their mouth closed.

Saying “I seen him,” makes a person seem less intelligent. Right or wrong, that’s the way it is.

.

OK. It is still something that should be corrected.