Native fluency: only 1.5 MB of information needed?

[tommus]

Kids store 1.5 megabytes of information to master their native language

And the link at the bottom of that page to Humans store about 1.5 megabytes of information during language acquisition

It sounds so easy. Only 1.5 MB. That can't be so much that an adult couldn't do it quickly?

[Wurstmann]

If it were only used for vocabulary, 1.5 MB would be around 349525 words. So still a lot of information xD

[DaveAgain]

Kids store 1.5 megabytes of information to master their native language

And the link at the bottom of that page to Humans store about 1.5 megabytes of information during language acquisition

It sounds so easy. Only 1.5 MB. That can't be so much that an adult couldn't do it quickly?

One question that comes out this is where do we store it all?

Some people have perfect recall, so the information must be there somewhere.

PS
(A lecture about how babies learn language suggested statistical analysis of everything they heard was the process.)

[tommus]

If it were only used for vocabulary, 1.5 MB would be around 349525 words. So still a lot of information xD

I would estimate 180,000 words. Still a lot.

The 3000 most common English words take about 25 KB to store. And 1500/25 = 60. Then 3000 * 60 = 180,000

3000 most common English words

[Wurstmann]

If it were only used for vocabulary, 1.5 MB would be around 349525 words. So still a lot of information xD

I would estimate 180,000 words. Still a lot.

The 3000 most common English words take about 25 KB to store. And 1500/25 = 60. Then 3000 * 60 = 180,000

3000 most common English words

I was going by this. It says the average length of a English word is 4.5 letters.

[tommus]

I was going by this. It says the average length of a English word is 4.5 letters.

Interesting.

For the 3000 words (above), they take 25,222 bytes which means 8.4 bytes per word on average. But in regular text, a lot of small words show up very often, words like a, I, in, at, on, the, and, etc. So in regular text, the average word length would probably be smaller. So I took some plain text articles from today's BBC news, and put them together in a plain text file. In that sample, the average word length was 6.1 bytes. So perhaps the 4.5 letters per word would be for simple regular text, not word lists where all the common short words occur only once.

[Deinonysus]

Proof that English is easier: English has no diacritics so your brain can store the vocabulary as ASCII text, only one byte per letter. Other languages need Unicode encoding which takes up more neurons.

[tommus]

Proof that English is easier.

Indeed. Some other languages like Dutch and German where long, compounded words are common, average word lengths must be considerably longer. Such as:

Dutch
Hottentottensoldatententententoonstellingsbouwterrein
meaning: "construction ground for the Hottentot soldiers' tents exhibition"

German
Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung
meaning: "deferral of the second iteration of the federal presidential run-off election"

Afrikaans
Tweedehandsemotorverkoopsmannevakbondstakingsvergaderingsameroeperstoespraakskrywerspersverklaringuitreikingsmediakonferensieaankondiging
meaning: "issuable media conference's announcement at a press release regarding the convener's speech at a secondhand car dealership union's strike meeting"

And of course, these are very common words that often occur in normal conversation!

One would tend to think that these long words don't put an extra burden on learning the language because they are made up of a bunch of short, simple words. That works to some extent in reading and listening. However, in writing or speaking, it is not so easy to know or remember which words to put together and in which order. So this just increases the difficulty for active usage versus passive usage. I often wonder about native speakers using such long compound words. Do they even think about them being run together, or do they just say them as an English native would use a series of separate words? I think it depends on the mostoftenusedenglishcommonwordcombinations.

Check out the Wikipedia longest words by language.

[Cainntear]

Proof that English is easier: English has no diacritics so your brain can store the vocabulary as ASCII text, only one byte per letter. Other languages need Unicode encoding which takes up more neurons.

Only if you use boring old 7-bit ASCII. 8-bit ASCII with a Latin Extended charades did most of Europe well enough in the 90s.

Now excuse me... I’m off to download my languages onto 3.5” floppy disks...

[zenmonkey]

The brain is not computer, nor does it use bits. It’s not surprising that the article referenced the 1958 von Neumann “Computer and The Brain” for its estimation.

All these discussions about how many bits a word takes ... we process language as sounds, not as text.