How to Learn a Language Quickly

Researches and simulations show that one can learn the meaning of words rapidly if he or she assume that every object has only one word.

Richard Blythe from the University of Edinburgh in the UK look into the problem. Small-scale lab tests have shown that children and adults use mutual exclusivity to determine word meaning. But researchers don’t know how effective this strategy is compared with others when dealing with hundreds or thousands of words.

To solve this question, Blythe and his colleagues used a physics analogy like others in the past. They assume word learning resembles some problems in nonequilibrium statistical physics, where a large number of entities (such as molecules and atoms) interact, and the probability distributions for certain states evolve over time. In language learning, a word like “cup” will start off with many confounders, and so the probability of “cup” meaning cup will be low. But over time this probability—and that of other word-meaning pairs—will grow to one, analogous to the system approaching equilibrium.

The researchers figure it out that the mutual exclusivity assumption is extremely effective.

Linda Smith, a cognitive scientist from Indiana University in Bloomington, says that mutual exclusivity is a common theme in brain studies. “Competition is how the brain works—in all domains, at all levels,” she says. If the brain forms an oassociatin between a word and an object, this will inhibit other words from forming a similar association with the same object. She expects some psychologists will take issue with the idea that learners retain a set of confounders for each word from one utterance to the next, but she says that similar kinds of ambiguity are included in theories of the brain’s memory retrieval.