Excerpt from The Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. 20: A Quarterly International Record of Educational Literature Institutions and Progress; 1913
Our daughter Alice"s vocabulary of 2,153 words represents very nearly her actual knowledge of language; for we began at her second year to keep record of her words, and after many revisions and a comparison with a long list published in The Pedagogical Seminary, we are not conscious of having missed many words that she has used intelligently. On the very first day of keeping the record we got 355. Alice was then twenty-three months old. On her second birthday the number was 455; and it grew at the rate of about 100 per month, until the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth months, when our viligance lapsed. So that at two and a half years her vocabulary was but 1,111. We began the search with new interest and amazing success during the thirty-first, thirty-second, thirty-third and thirty-fourth months; having at that time a published child"s vocabulary for comparison. On the day before her third birthday we thought we had 2,106 words; but upon recount found the correct total to be 2,153.
During the last three months we tested her knowledge of words about which we were doubtful by asking her to give their definitions, a thing she likes to do, and often asks to be given a chance to do.
We adopted Prof. Whipple"s method of counting the past tense and participle forms of verbs as distinct words. However I observed that toward the last she would use the present progressive form of even the latest verb she had learned; that is she seemed to know that "ing" put on any word of action expressed a continuing of the action.
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