TV and other media
Snapshot of the US: 65 days in front of the TV and five months of media
"If you are reading this as you surf the internet while the TV is on, the radio is playing and you are listening to music on your personal stereo you are already tapping into the American way of media multi-tasking."
The average US adult spends over 3500 hours each year on (English-language) media.
According to 2007 US Census Bureau figures the average US adult spent
65 days in front of the TV
41 days listening to the radio
A little over a week on the Internet
A week reading a daily newspaper
A week listening to recorded music
Per day:
4.27 hours watching TV
2.7 hours listening to the radio
And roughly 30 minutes per day
surfing,
reading a newspaper
and listening to music
The Internet statistic seems to contradict some other published research. The likely reason is that places like Bowker or Nielsen track “nationally representative” panels of U.S adult men, women and teens. In other words, if you’re reading this you’re also more likely to be “wired” and “representative”.
“Viewers in Japan remain the world's top TV watchers, with a viewing time of four hours and 29 minutes per person per day, just ahead of the United States where time spent in front of the box was four hours and 25 minutes.”
British people watch TV 148 minutes a day, 900 hours a year or 2944 days across the entire lifetime. Source: The Human Footprint Channel Four Documentary.
The average American adult spends 8 1/2 hours a day staring into all types of screens. Link
“…the observers recorded — in 10-second increments — consumer exposure to visual content presented on any of four categories of screens: traditional television (including live TV as well as DVD/VCR and DVR playback); computer (including Web use, e-mail, instant messaging and stored or streaming video); mobile devices such as a Blackberry or iPhone (including Web use, text messaging and mobile video); and "all other screens" (including display screens in out-of-home environments, in-cinema movies and other messaging and even GPS navigation units).
All told, the VCM study generated data covering more than three-quarters of a million minutes or a total of 952 observed days. This is the largest and most extensive observational study of media usage ever conducted. the VCM study found the average for all other age groups to be "strikingly similar" at roughly 8 1/2 hours”
College students may be watching less TV but they’re still glued to a screen. They are also "multitasking".
“The findings confirm other recent reports concluding that college students are heavy online users. For instance, earlier this month Alloy Media + Marketing reported that students spend 3.5 hours a day e-mailing, instant messaging and Web surfing, and 6.5 hours a week on social networking sites. Burst also found that a large number of students spend minimal time with either the TV or the radio. Around 30 percent of respondents reported spending less than three hours per week watching television, while almost half--46 percent--said they devote less than three hours a week to radio listening. What's more, many college students who watch TV or listen to the radio are multi-tasking at the time. Around 64 percent of respondents report using the computer when viewing TV, while around 60 percent use a computer while the radio is on.”
The average college student spends a very small percentage of his or her time in class or studying. Link
TV and children
Number of TV commercials viewed by American children a year: 20,000
Age by which children can develop brand loyalty: 2
Time per day that TV is on in an average US home: 7 hours, 40 minutes
Hours of TV watching per week shown to negatively affect academic achievement: 10+
Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900
Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1023
Music: Americans spend 3.7 hours per week listening to music on CDs/iPods
Source: PubTrack Consumer
Speaking
A five-year old child’s typical verbal output is 10,000 – 15,000 words per day of grammatically correct, meaningful communication, drawing on a vocabulary of about 5,000 words.
The most comprehensive study of this kind involving college students found that both men and women used an average of 16,000 words each day or about 15 words per waking minute, assuming a person sleeps 7 hours.
The researchers also pointed out that there are "very large individual differences around this mean," or average. For instance, one of the most talkative males spewed out 47,000 words a day (nearly 1 per second) compared with just more than 500 daily words for the least talkative male.
Keep in mind that the “silent type” college student speaking about 500 words per day is also a native speaker.
British people speak on average 4,300 words a day, more for women, less for men. This average figure is spread across the entire lifetime:
“The vocabulary of the average UK citizen is just 25,000 words, only 4% of the 616,000 words in the English Oxford Dictionary. We speak on average 4,300 words a day - more for women (6,400-8,000), less for men (2,000-4,000). That's 123,205,750 words in a lifetime.” If we compiled a book from all the words spoken in a lifetime, it would add up to some 5 volumes. Not nearly as impressive as the student chatterbox.
This information is from a transcript of “Human footprint” a Channel Four (British) documentary. There is also a US National Geographic version but I don't know if it is as detailed.
Women vs men (somewhat humorous, most figures apparently not based on solid or at least traceable research)
20,000/7,000; 30,000/15,000; 7,000/2,000; 30,000/12,000; 50,000/25,000; 25,000/12,000
Sarah and Tim experiment
Hannah: 12,329 words
Tim: 11,279 words
Hannah "accidentally" turned off her recorder for two hours so her real total could be 14,000. A likely story.
The average American spends at least 622 minutes a month on the cell phone which amounts approximately to at least 20 minutes of cell phone use per day. Minorities speak more.
Reading
The Britons will read 533 books (8 books per year) and 2,455 newspapers during their lifetimes. This will consume some 24 trees per person. Some 3% of people can't read in the U.K., 40% choose not to read, and more households own two cars than two novels! (The Human Footprint).
Americans spend 3.9 hours per week reading books. Some forty-five percent of Americans over the age of 13 read a book in 2008 and one in three of them were over the age of 55, according to Bowker.
Americans also spend four hours per week reading newspapers/magazines.
These figures vary. One newspaper headline: “3 out of 4 Americans read books each year.” Another: “One in four Americans read no books last year”.
Listening
Now, this is a tough one. Obviously TV, radio etc. needs to be counted but what about daily verbal communication? Some good figures can be found about children:
According to some studies, parents should speak at least 17,000 words per day to children before age 3 in order to ensure academic success:
This "groundbreaking" 1995 study apparently caught on with the rest of us in 2008 thanks to ABC news.
"By age 3, children from privileged families have heard 30 million more words than children from underprivileged families. Longitudinal data on 42 families examined what accounted for enormous differences in rates of vocabulary growth. Children turned out to be like their parents in stature, activity level, vocabulary resources, and language and interaction styles. Follow-up data indicated that the 3-year-old measures of accomplishment predicted third grade school achievement."
Hart and Risley (2003)
Number of words heard at home per hour by 1- and 2-year-olds learning to talk:
low-income child: 620
middle-income child: 1,250
high-income child: 2,150
Number of words heard by age 3:
low-income child: 10 million
middle-income child: 20 million
high-income child: 30 million
Source: Hart & Risley, 1995. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young Children
The New York Times article What It Takes to Make a Student has more on this:
"They found ... that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79...
When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour. What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development."
More about this here
Parent anxiety has helped create some curious products:
Device Counts Amount of Baby Talk a Day
Experts Say Children Should Hear 25 Million Words By 4 Years Old
Lena, created by Infotorture er, Infoture, Inc., is a "verbal pedometer" that helps parents gauge how vocal they are with their child by measuring the number of distinct words a baby hears.
A little bit about vocabulary development in small children
By age 3, a child is forming simple sentences, mastering grammar, and experiencing a “vocabulary explosion” that will result, by age 6, in a lexicon of more than 10,000words.
Ross A. Thompson, Developmental Psychologist, University of California, Davis - National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Link
“Children continue to learn new words throughout the preschool period and into the school years. Anglin (1993) has estimated that, on average, children’s vocabularies grow from 11,000 words at age 6 to 20,000 words at age 8 to 40,000 words at the age of 10 years….
Towards the end of the second year of life children begin to acquire morphology. The acquisition of morphological knowledge marks an important milestone in language development because it is an essential component of mastering grammatical rules and also in the development of vocabulary.”
Developmental psychology by Margaret Harris, George Butterworth
