The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-02-26
CHILD'S VOCABULARY
EXPERIMENTS sHoW IT TO BE
 REMARKABLY LARGE.

Littie One at Four Years of Age Has
 as Largo n Vocabulary as an AduIt
 fn Ordinary Conversation.
 When a very little girl indeed is trod- ding about and playing with her dolls how many different words has she at commando The learned gentlemen who have ventured guesses in the matter have been Of the opinion that the num- Der was small. Professor William Swinton says that for the ordinary English conversation of adults four thousand words is a liberal estimate. There has even been a popular notion growing out of the statements made by people who have ''easy language methods to exploit-that the average grown-up got along with under thou sand words. So far as child talk is con- cerned, there have been till recently no scientific data, but the results of a se- ries of patient Investigations by the late Professor John I. Jegi, of Milwaukee. seem to show that very small children know an astonishing number of words that, in fact, child of four actually uses as many different words as Profes- sor Swinton would allow for an adults complete practical conversational arIna- ment.
 The ingenious Professor Jegi had little girl named Grace. When Grace began to talk the professor began to carry about with him a notebook and to set down therein every word he heard the little one say. At the age of two years this record showed that Grace was using in her daily chatter some thing over twelve hundred words-ex- act figures, 1,227. Later the professor not only kept his notebook, but under lined in pocket dictionary every word he heard the child use. From time to time he checked up the notebook with the dictionary. Then few days after Grace's fourth birthday he hired s;ten- ographer to follow the young lady around all day and take down in short hand her entire output of talk. It must have been dull for the stenographer, but for the first few hours it was all fun for Grace. Then she grew tired and ceased to chatter. She wanted the lady with the notebook sent home. Condi- tions being thus unfavora ble, the sci- entifc parent did send away the steno- grapher, and the record stood only for the forenoon. In that time-ive hours Grace used 665 different words. Over one-third of the entire number was used but once, about one-fourth were used two or three times, a few were used very many times. The most frequently recurring word, T. 7 had 346 repetitions to it's credit: other hack words were sto,'' you ''a," "is,' .sit,' ''the, 7 that" my" have" yes The con- plete stenographic report of the morn ing's eloquence would make something over two newspaper columns closely printed in minion type. It reads like this:
 rNo. I never saw that little pin you are wearing on that collar. We got some pretty flowers to the picnic. Didn't we? Didn't we get some pretty flowers at the picnic? Some one took my flowers, now. I'm going to get some more when I go out to that picnic, and I won't let anybody take them" etc, etc, to the length above indicted.
 Professor sJegi made a laborious anal ysis of this record word by word He grouped the words alphabetically. Un- der A, for instance, he placed every word beginning with that letter, noting in each case the number of times the word had been used by the child during the test period.
 Then the professor made table showing the number of each part ot speech occurring under each letter, and got these totals. Nouns, 245; verbs 1884; adjectives Hi; adverbs, A prepo- sitions, IS: pronouns, 27; interjections 12; conjunctions. z; contractions IT; giving the grand total 665, mentioned above. That, of course, takes no ac- count of proper names of persons ant places used by little Grace Naturally her display of nouns is biggest-lnort than third of all the words used; th' verbs amount to a little more than { fourth of the total.
 So much for the child's talk during one forenoon. The records kept in th' dictionary and in the note book. cover ing practically all the words Grace hat everused, and therefore all she knew a the age of four years, counted up t thirty-three hundred. Of these nearly two-thirds were nouns as would be nat ural in childish vocabulary. Th numbers for each part of speech in tn total of thirty-three hundred is givel thus, in round numbers: Nouns, 1000 verbs, 700; adjectives, S95; adverbs, 116 propositions, 35; interjections, 31; pro nouns, 30; conjunctions, Il. Fron