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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: 2) by Mykl on Friday March 29 2019, @02:58AM (1 child)

    by Mykl (1112) on Friday March 29 2019, @02:58AM (#821643)

    Agree - I think this figure is total bullshit.

    While it may be possible to stuff a dictionary and set of grammar rules into a floppy, I doubt you could also fit:

    • A thesaurus
    • The knowledge of how to infer the definition of a new word
    • Errar cekhing sow peepil c4n shtill unnerstan' meening, if even different order words are in
    • Actual association between words and their meaning, e.g. to actually get the difference between 'despair' and 'melancholy'. Or, to actually be able to bring up associations, flavours, textures, colors, different types etc when I say "Bread". It's pointless having a list of words if they don't help you interact with the world around you

    That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure there are more. Now stick that in your floppy!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @05:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @05:05AM (#821676)

    Yeah, how is learning 1000 bits/day remarkable? That's a weak-ass data rate, and anyway, bits and bytes are probably not the right way to measure human knowledge.