shel90,
That was deliberately an exaggeration to try to make a point, [sorry for not pointing this out!
] but it doesn't seem too unlikely that hearing people can receive between 5-20 times more information than a deaf person in hearing culture. I have yet to see a study done on this, though, so it's up for educated guessing.
But here are some citations I just came up with:
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Speech synthesizer: Information from Answers.com - "A typical spoken conversation takes place at a rate of 150–200 words per minute." For a 12-hour period that would be between 108,000-144,000 spoken words with constant exposure.
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Past Issues - UI Design Newsletter - "The average adult reading speed for English prose text in the United States seems to be around 250 to 300 words per minute." For a 12-hour period that would be between 180,000-216,000 visually observed words with constant exposure.
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Speed reading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "the World Championship Speed Reading Competition stresses reading comprehension as critical, and that the top contestants typically read around 1000 to 2000 words per minute with approximately 50% comprehension." From this, it is obvious some people can read between 500-1000 wpm with fairly good comprehension, reading more than double the words some people do on average.
Thus, it wouldn't be too far from reality to say hearing people can get about 150,000-200,000 words/day.
However, deaf people have to turn and face something to get information, so I'd guess it could be anywhere between 5-20 times less information received by deaf people based on setting (work, school, etc) and lipreading skill.
200,000 / 10 = 20,000 words/day seems probable for many deaf people in hearing culture. Between 15,000-50,000 words/day seems like a reasonable estimation. It's relative to how one spends time... reading or whatever. That's still a huge difference.
Southern, if I'm going off topic, sorry about that. I wanted to stress the importance of having Deaf culture and make it clear that it has relevance to meeting D/deaf people's needs, so Deaf culture is basically for
any deaf person, regardless of degree of hearing loss.