Re: CHAT: Parallelism

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Charles wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
>
> How many new words of vocabulary can we learn per day?
> (Firstly, as children; secondly, as adults.)
> Compare that to the size of any natlang vocabulary,
> multiplied by exceptions and connotations.
>
A child can easily learn ten new words a day, but will
often only use them actively after having sort of digested
them - at least, that's my personal experience with Naomi.
Neither of the two works on the subject I have give any
indication on the speed of learning (Elliot 1981 and Gleitman
& Landau 1994). It occurs in bursts, too.

As for adults: the late Benedict (of Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan fame)
could memorize a wordlist with a single scan, while still playing the
psycho-therapist to a patient. George van Driem doesn't have to
do more than hear or read a word once. I need about a week for a word
to sink in, with daily repetition, but I can easily do a few hundred
in a week simultaneously. Phrases are easier, though!

> Each word has to be integrated, in its meaning, sound, usage,
> with everything we already know. This burns many neurons.
> I have read most of the Teach Yourself books (I hope!)
> but my Tamil vocab is not all it should be. One nice thing
> about AUXLANG is hearing the language teachers discuss
> the difference between nice theory and dirty practice.
>
Neither is my Maltese vocabulary!

> Your assertion is true in the sense that one cannot perform,
> e.g. one's golf swing, by conscious step-by-step thinking
> in real-time; but that is how most non-trivial learning
> and adjustment happen. Memory is not static (as per Bartlett);
> we are constantly rebuilding the indexes to the database.
>
If Oracle would sell databases as reliably as our own memory,
they'd be awfully quickly out of business! I can get really
angry with myself when I realize how much of my Chinese characters
I've lost...

References

Elliot, Alison. 1981. _Child Language_. Cambridge

Gleitman, Lila and Barbara Landau, eds. 1994. _The
Acquisition of the Lexicon_. Cambridge (Massachusets).

(You'd really think that a book with the title
_The Acquisition of the Lexicon_ would tell you how
rapidly a human being can acquire the lexicon, but
it doesn't!)

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt