人类在语言习得过程中会存储约1.5兆字节的信息。

Mollica Francis, Piantadosi Steven T

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA.

Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.

R Soc Open Sci. 2019 Mar 27;6(3):181393. doi: 10.1098/rsos.181393. eCollection 2019 Mar.

We introduce theory-neutral estimates of the amount of information learners possess about how language works. We provide estimates at several levels of linguistic analysis: phonemes, wordforms, lexical semantics, word frequency and syntax. Our best guess is that the average English-speaking adult has learned 12.5 million bits of information, the majority of which is lexical semantics. Interestingly, very little of this information is syntactic, even in our upper bound analyses. Generally, our results suggest that learners possess remarkable inferential mechanisms capable of extracting, on average, nearly 2000 bits of information about how language works for 18 years.

我们引入了对学习者所拥有的关于语言运作方式的信息量的理论中立估计。我们在几个语言分析层面提供了估计：音素、词形、词汇语义、词频和句法。我们的最佳猜测是，以英语为母语的普通成年人已经学习了1250万比特的信息，其中大部分是词汇语义。有趣的是，即使在我们的上限分析中，这些信息中句法方面的也很少。总体而言，我们的结果表明，学习者拥有卓越的推理机制，平均而言，能够在18年的时间里提取近2000比特的关于语言运作方式的信息。