tastyonions wrote:Interesting:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9618302198 We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor's or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor's or graduate degree.
Yes, I've seen many of these studies over the years (please note that I cannot read the entirety of the one you linked to due to a paywall). I was happy to see that, unlike some, this one did mention the growing percentage of the US population whose native language is a language other than English. Said percentage grew rapidly over the same time period being discussed here with respect to vocabulary decline:
The number of people in the United States who spoke a language other than English at home nearly tripled from 23.1 million (about 1 in 10) in 1980 to 67.8 million (almost 1 in 5) in 2019, according to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report.
Source:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/languages-we-speak-in-united-states.htmlI cannot presume to quantify the impact that has had, but given how much smaller the vocabulary of a non-native speaker is, I imagine it has had a non-trivial impact on the population-wide average English vocabulary size. Of course, these people have much larger vocabularies in their native languages.
As I said, this paper does mention immigrant populations as a potential explanatory factor for the noted vocabulary drop (thus it is fair to assume that they included non-native speakers in their sample), but there seems to be no attempt made to evaluate to what extent this factor explains changing trends.
There are other reasons, I'm sure, for the decline in average US adult vocabulary size. The state of education in the US cannot be helping, and many people's reading has shifted more toward texts, short blogs, tweets, and listicles rather than more challenging material such as books and longform articles. Anti-intellectual sentiment in the US is arguably at a historic high. In addition, the economic payoff for an advanced vocabulary is declining - just ask the many people with advanced degrees who are driving Ubers or working in food service. When the perceived payoff of education declines, so does the effort invested therein.
All of that being said, it's a fallacy to assume that any linguistic shift happening during a period of time when average vocabulary sizes are dropping is automatically a devolution (whatever that might be taken to mean). I agree that "a bunch of" has no place in formal or professional writing, but when used in daily speech or informal writing, especially with one's friends and family, as a synonym for "a lot of," I don't think it's any cause for alarm.