ESRC language grant

A psychologist at Swansea University has been awarded a grant of more than £95,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council to study how people acquire language and vocabulary during the course of their lives.

Cristina Izura, a lecturer in the psychology department, said:

"I am driven by the fact that the average educated adult has a vocabulary of between 180,000 and 200,000 words and can speak at a rate of two to four words per second. It is commonly agreed that the brain can recognise and process the words we want to use faster than we can say them - but we still don't really understand why this should be."