Main Content

Word knowledge in the German crowd

When they produce language, the average speaker of German uses between 12.000 and 16.000 words. However, the major German dictionary, Duden, estimates that passive word knowledge is much larger than that, suggesting about 50.000 different words that Germans can understand. This astonishing estimation begs the question how exactly word knowledge is distributed in the German population. The project ‘Word knowledge in the German crowd’, is a joint research initiative between the University of Marburg, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and other interested institutions.

The goal of the project is to conduct a large online study where German speaking participants from all walks of lives indicate for a large number of German words whether they know them or not.

It has become clear that in contrast to other cognitive abilities individuals continue to accumulate word knowledge as they age. However, are there systematic differences in word knowledge between different genders? Educations? Does handedness play a role? And how is word knowledge distributed across different parts of Germany, Austria and Switzerland? These are the kinds of questions the project seeks to address. In addition, we will make available the resulting database as a resource for other researchers in the field who can use it for various scientific purposes (e.g., creating stimuli for their language experiments).

Team members

Sandra Bethke (MPI for Psycholinguistics)
Nadja Daum
Ulrike Domahs
Johanna Funk
Sandra Grom
Matthias Hahn
Katja Häuser (Saarland University)
Florian Hintz
Toke Hoffmeister
Alfred Lameli
Antje Meyer (MPI for Psycholinguistics)
Paula Rinke
Anna Rosenkranz
Lea Schäfer
Sascha Schroeder (University of Göttingen)