Thanks for the link. Here's a little bit of detail about their sample gathering, which I found interesting:
The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their native language, what their age and gender were, which country they came from, and their level of education. For the present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56% were completed by female participants and 44% by male participants.
The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that used by many online quizzes:
Word test
How many English words do you know? With this test you get a valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4 minutes and you help scientific research.
Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went viral in some specific communities.
Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it... but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.
The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their native language, what their age and gender were, which country they came from, and their level of education. For the present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56% were completed by female participants and 44% by male participants.
The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that used by many online quizzes:
Word test
How many English words do you know? With this test you get a valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4 minutes and you help scientific research.
Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went viral in some specific communities.
Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it... but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.