Statistical Analysis - Assignment 1.3

The term mentally challenged only began being used after the 1980’s, before that nobody ever used the phrase to describe a disabled person. The term was used to define those who are intellectually disabled. After the 1990’s there was a large spike in the frequency of using ‘mentally challenged’ to describe people with numerous disabilities, including those with development disabilities. The phrase was most used through 2005 – 2009, and in 2010 there was a major downturn, and the frequency of people using mentally challenged to describe people reduced radically. The phrase was mainly used academically. Doctors and numerous other academic fellows used it to describe different types of disabled people. Magazines and newspapers when appropriate used ‘mentally challenged’ as a phrase in their articles, but the frequency used in magazines and newspapers was much lower that academically. The word ‘disabled’ is more widely used to describe people when compared to ‘mentally challenged’ because it has been there for a longer period of time and hence is more acceptable. 

http://corpus.byu.edu
http://books.google.com/ngrams