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posted by martyb on Thursday March 28 2019, @11:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the read-write-listen-speak dept.

Kids store 1.5 megabytes of information to master their native language

[...] research from UC Berkeley suggests that language acquisition between birth and 18 is a remarkable feat of cognition, rather than something humans are just hardwired to do.

Researchers calculated that, from infancy to young adulthood, learners absorb approximately 12.5 million bits of information about language — about two bits per minute — to fully acquire linguistic knowledge. If converted into binary code, the data would fill a 1.5 MB floppy disk, the study found.

The findings, published today in the Royal Society Open Science journal, challenge assumptions that human language acquisition happens effortlessly, and that robots would have an easy time mastering it.

"Ours is the first study to put a number on the amount you have to learn to acquire language," said study senior author Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. "It highlights that children and teens are remarkable learners, absorbing upwards of 1,000 bits of information each day."

For example, when presented with the word "turkey," a young learner typically gathers bits of information by asking, "Is a turkey a bird? Yes, or no? Does a turkey fly? Yes, or no?" and so on, until grasping the full meaning of the word "turkey."

Humans store about 1.5 megabytes of information during language acquisition (open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.181393) (DX)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Thursday March 28 2019, @12:34PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Thursday March 28 2019, @12:34PM (#821271) Journal

    There are plenty of ways to pack more than 1440 KiB onto a high-density 3.5" floppy disk. Distribution Media Format [wikipedia.org] and Amiga floppy format both pack sectors into a track with tighter tolerances, without the gaps needed for rewriting an individual sector. In those formats, an entire track must be rewritten at once. Mac 400K and 800K and Apple IIGS 800K would slow down the spindle when reading or writing the (longer) outer tracks in order to pack more data into them.

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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday March 28 2019, @02:08PM

    by looorg (578) on Thursday March 28 2019, @02:08PM (#821316)

    Indeed, different file format. With your own storage system and trackloader of some kind you could get a bit more in there on the Amiga. As I recall it now the Amiga HD floppy (came as standard for the A4000) format was 1.76MB with the standard fast file system for a floppy disk, it could be increased a bit more if you used one of the later more specialized systems but not that much more, they where more about read speed then getting that much more space.