How to Improve Your Vocabulary This video discussed some important “VOCABULARY” that we may regularly use in our speaking or reading English. We are teaching vocabulary in 3 easy ways. We also help our students to be efficient and fluent in oral English communication. This class is part of our “Basic English” Course of “English Gurukul”
How to Improve Your Vocabulary
A vocabulary (also known as a lexicon) is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from the Latin vocabulary, meaning “a word, name”. It forms an essential component of language and communication, helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral, written, or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary (words one uses regularly) and passive vocabulary (words one recognizes but doesn’t use often).
An individual’s vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction, independent reading, and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting, trauma, or disease. Furthermore, vocabulary is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics, education, psychology, and artificial intelligence.
Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as collocations, idioms, and other types of phraseology. Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language.
General Definition
One’s vocabulary typically refers to the set of words that an individual knows and uses in a particular language. It is a fundamental aspect of language acquisition and literacy development.
Linguistics
In linguistics, vocabulary refers to all the words in a language or in a person’s lexical repertoire. It encompasses both a speaker’s passive vocabulary, which includes the words they recognize or understand, and their active vocabulary, which includes the words they use regularly in speech and writing.
Education
In the context of education, vocabulary refers to the body of words, including their meanings and use, that a student learns and uses. Vocabulary acquisition is a central aspect of language education, as it directly impacts reading comprehension, expressive and receptive language skills, and academic achievement.
Psychology
Within psychology, especially cognitive psychology, vocabulary is understood as a measure of language processing and cognitive development. It can serve as an indicator of intellectual ability or cognitive status, with vocabulary tests often forming part of intelligence and neuropsychological assessments.
Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence
In computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, a vocabulary is a predetermined set of words used for natural language processing tasks, such as speech recognition or text analysis. In machine learning models, the vocabulary is the set of unique words from the training dataset, which forms the basis for feature extraction and model training.
Semiotics
In semiotics, vocabulary refers to the complete set of symbols and signs in a sign system or a text, extending the definition beyond purely verbal communication to encompass other forms of symbolic communication.
Definition of “word”
Word has a variety of meanings, and our understand of ideas such as vocabulary size differ depending on the definition used.
The most common definition equates words with lemmas (the inflected or dictionary form; this includes walk, but not walks, walked or walking). Most of the time lemmas do not include proper nouns (names of people, places, companies, etc.). Another definition often used in research of vocabulary size is that of word family.
These are all the words that can be derived from a ground word (e.g., the words effortless, effortlessly, effortful, effortfully are all part of the word family effort). Estimates of vocabulary size range from as high as 200 thousand to as low as 10 thousand, depending on the definition used.
Type–token distinction
The type-token distinction is a concept in linguistics that pertains to the counting or measuring of words in a text. It is useful for studying language and discourse, assessing complexity and richness of a vocabulary, or for certain computational applications.
The token count in a text is the total number of words, without any consideration of their uniqueness. Each individual occurrence of a word is counted separately, so if a word repeats, each instance is counted. For example, in the sentence I heard you when you called your son, there are eight tokens. This is because there are eight individual words (I, heard, you, when, you, called, your, son).
The type count includes unique words only, and usually, this is unique lemmas. If a lemma appears multiple times in a text, it is counted only once in a type count. So, in the same sentence I heard you when you called your son, there are six types. This is because there are six unique lemmas in the sentence (I, heard, you, when, called, son). The lemma you is counted just once despite appearing three times in the sentence as you, you, and your.
