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Simpozij OBDOBJA 41 might be part of one person’s general vocabulary, and at the same time they might belong to another person’s intellectual vocabulary, depending on the difference in their everyday lives. From the point of view of vocabulary as a continuum, the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives are much more relevant in dealing with intellectual vocabulary than vocabulary as a whole because of its speciifc role in the cultural evolution of the community as well as the growth of the individual (Heyes 2018: 175). In psycholinguistics, the breadth and depth of vocabulary refers to the number of words that an individual recognizes and uses, as well as the number of meanings of those words and their connections to other words. Although such a two-dimensional approach is to some extent debated, it is frequently used. Many researchers ifnd it useful: both those more oriented toward helping the dyslexic population (Wise et al. 2007) and those oriented toward theory and the non-dyslexic population (Perfetti, Hart 2002). Given the adverse circumstances of modern (digital) life and the reading of numerous short texts in electronic form, both the breadth and depth of general vocabulary is declining, especially in young people. Both neuroscientists (Spitzer 2018) and researchers of reading (Barzillai et al. 2018) have already noticed this. This decline is particularly striking in the general intellectual vocabulary used in many facets of life, including investigative journalism. Although I am not aware of research on this decline in intellectual vocabulary in everyday communication, most university teachers anecdotally claim that every year their students understand increasingly fewer of what used to be common intellectual words. Considering that the breadth and depth of vocabulary are the best predictors of the development of reading ability and success in intellectual activities such as education, as well as active participation in a democratic society, it is necessary to identify this problem and apply a targeted approach. 3 Method and analysis Together with students of Slovenian studies at the University of Zagreb, I analyzed what they considered intellectual vocabulary in three chapters selected from one literary text and two popular science texts. Among all the words that students did not understand in Slovenian and had to look up in a dictionary or elsewhere, the main criterion for extracting words belonging to intellectual vocabulary was predicting which words a young person entering high school would not necessarily readily understand in the text and use in an appropriate context. It was assumed that understanding these words requires a higher level of education and more abstract thinking, and therefore these words can be labeled as intellectual. In this, two competences were at play: competence in one’s native language, and competence in the second/foreign language. The research question is to what extent these two competencies mingle in recognizing and understanding words that can be said to belong to intellectual vocabulary. I address this question with a systematic analysis of such vocabulary. Literary and popular science texts were chosen because the goal was to compare the density of intellectual 273