“* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words ‘stick’ will reflect your intelligence’s efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy”
It’s still a weird efficiency, especially b/c it can be “gamed” by studying for SATs or by midwit infovoreautists who don’t have high working memory.
And yet, despite the SAT being so studied for, it remains a pretty good IQ test overall, and SAT-V or the GRE verbal parts OK. I think that’s because there are so many words (500k+ in English, and the GRE-V has no compunction about mining the obscurest just to f—with you), and you would have to study so many in order to meaningful inflate your scores (because after all, while there may be only a hundred ‘vocab words’ on any given SAT test, you don’t know which hundred). Let’s see… Here’s an interesting-looking reference: “How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age”, Brysbaert et al 2016
an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days.
So, if you wanted to boost your score from the mean to the 95th percentile, that seems to imply that you’d have to memorize 10,000 ‘lemmas’ (“Uninflected word from which all inflected words are derived”). That’s a big number, and then you have to ask how much work that would be.
If you did this in the optimal way with spaced repetition (ignoring the time it takes to figure out the 10k you want to memorize in the first place or the time to construct the flashcards or any penalty from needing to inefficiently cram them for an upcoming SAT instead of life-long efficient review), which of course still few students do, as spaced repetition systems remain a niche outside of medical school & foreign language study, the SuperMemo rough estimate is a long-term investment of 5 minutes per flashcard, and we’ll assume 1 lemma = 1 flashcard. That means you have to invest 10,00 * 5 = 50,000 minutes or 833 hours of studying! Meanwhile, hardly anyone is doing more than 8 hours of studying for the SAT as a whole (among the kids I knew at a prep high school, many didn’t even do a weekend course, which would entail about 8 hours of classwork & study). 833 hours for vocab alone would be insane.
That’s why people generally learn vocab from passive exposure rather than targeted study. Because no one, not even the most teacher’s-pet student, wants to do that. And so vocab measures keep working.
It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times.
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all…
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)
“* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words ‘stick’ will reflect your intelligence’s efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy”
It’s still a weird efficiency, especially b/c it can be “gamed” by studying for SATs or by midwit infovoreautists who don’t have high working memory.
And yet, despite the SAT being so studied for, it remains a pretty good IQ test overall, and SAT-V or the GRE verbal parts OK. I think that’s because there are so many words (500k+ in English, and the GRE-V has no compunction about mining the obscurest just to f—with you), and you would have to study so many in order to meaningful inflate your scores (because after all, while there may be only a hundred ‘vocab words’ on any given SAT test, you don’t know which hundred). Let’s see… Here’s an interesting-looking reference: “How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age”, Brysbaert et al 2016
So, if you wanted to boost your score from the mean to the 95th percentile, that seems to imply that you’d have to memorize 10,000 ‘lemmas’ (“Uninflected word from which all inflected words are derived”). That’s a big number, and then you have to ask how much work that would be.
If you did this in the optimal way with spaced repetition (ignoring the time it takes to figure out the 10k you want to memorize in the first place or the time to construct the flashcards or any penalty from needing to inefficiently cram them for an upcoming SAT instead of life-long efficient review), which of course still few students do, as spaced repetition systems remain a niche outside of medical school & foreign language study, the SuperMemo rough estimate is a long-term investment of 5 minutes per flashcard, and we’ll assume 1 lemma = 1 flashcard. That means you have to invest 10,00 * 5 = 50,000 minutes or 833 hours of studying! Meanwhile, hardly anyone is doing more than 8 hours of studying for the SAT as a whole (among the kids I knew at a prep high school, many didn’t even do a weekend course, which would entail about 8 hours of classwork & study). 833 hours for vocab alone would be insane.
That’s why people generally learn vocab from passive exposure rather than targeted study. Because no one, not even the most teacher’s-pet student, wants to do that. And so vocab measures keep working.
It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
How could you possibly know something like that?
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)