Science

The information our brain needs to learn a language could almost fit on a floppy disk


All of the information our brain needs to learn a language could almost fit on a floppy disk

  • The average English-speaking adult has learned 12.5 million bits of information
  • Learning the frequency of words that need to appear requires more memory  
  • Sound patterns of individual words known as phonemes can take up 750 bits 

To master English as a native speaker, the average adult has to learn almost as much information as the contents of a full floppy disk, experts estimate.

That amount of information translates to 12.5 million bits or roughly 1.5 megabytes (mb), while the iconic storage device holds 1.44mb of information.

The data is mostly in the form of word definitions rather than complex structures like grammar.

This is the first time that researchers have tried try to work out the amount of information our brains need to store in order to master a single language.

To master English as a native speaker, the average adult has to learn almost as much information as a full floppy disk - the archaic computer disks once widely used (stock image)

To master English as a native speaker, the average adult has to learn almost as much information as a full floppy disk – the archaic computer disks once widely used (stock image)

Researchers from the University of Rochester in New York analysed different aspects of language learning and found the average learner acquires nearly 2,000 bits of information about how language works daily. 

For the average adult, this means from the moment they are born to when they are 18-years-old. 

The authors of the study Dr Francis Mollica and Dr Steven T Piantadosi wrote in their paper: ‘In terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk.’

The team estimated the upper and lower estimates of how much information a native speaker must acquire during the language learning in their study. 

At top end, the amount of information ranged from 10 million bits in total for a native speaker. 

At the bottom end it is around a million bits which means learners need to remember 120 bits of data a day from birth to 18 years.

The researchers’ best estimates put the figure around 1000–2000 bits of learning each day.    

That amount of information translates to 12.5 million bits or roughly 1.5 megabytes, of information, mostly in the form of word definitions rather than more complex structures like grammar (stock image)

That amount of information translates to 12.5 million bits or roughly 1.5 megabytes, of information, mostly in the form of word definitions rather than more complex structures like grammar (stock image)

The estimates were also made for different levels of speech and language, included sounds of individual words, word meaning, word frequency and the arrangement of words in sentence. 

Sound patterns of individual words – called phonemes – alone can take up 750 bits given that there are 50 in English and each require 15 bits of data. 

Another level of learning, that of remembering individual words, requires about 10 bits per word. 

And that amount of memory doesn’t even include the words’ meanings, which is another level.

Dr Mollica told New Scientist: ‘It’s lexical semantics, which is the full meaning of a word. If I say ‘turkey’ to you, there’s information you know about a turkey. 

‘You can answer whether or not it can fly, whether it can walk,’ Dr Mollica said.

‘All that requires about 12 million bits for 40,000 words.’

Learning the frequency of words that appears in languages requires memory too – 80,000 bits to be exact.

So does syntax, or sentence arrangement of words, which takes the brain another 700 bits to store. 

Totalling up this all comes to about the size of a floppy disk.  

HOW DO DIFFERENT BRAIN CIRCUITS AFFECT OUR ABILITY TO LEARN LANGUAGE? 

Researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center analyzed the findings of 16 studies that examined language learning in two systems in the brain: declarative and procedural memory.

According to the researchers, the ability to remember words of a particular language is linked to the ability to learn using declarative memory.

Grammar abilities, on the other hand, were linked to procedural memory in children learning their native language.

For adults, learning a foreign language first correlated with declarative memory, before later moving on to procedural memory.

The phenomenon was seen consistently across several languages, including English, French, Finnish, and Japanese.

 



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