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Word freqs vs Word learning: Paradox? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4539 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 1 of 19 18 November 2014 at 9:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Something struck me today as I was waking up, which I can't quite work out in my head. I thought perhaps someone here on HTLAL could help.
1. It's generally accepted that we learn words by exposure from reading and listening, and that we need to encounter a word a certain number of times to remember it (anywhere between 6-50 times in the literature). 2. The likelihood of encountering a word drops off very quickly for lower frequency words (exponentially?). 3. Children throughout their childhood learn about 1000 new words every year. So does that really mean that children are being exposed to exponentially more words every year of their childhood? I find it hard to believe that children talk that much more between 6 and 16 years old. I can believe that they read more, but is it really the case that they are reading expotentially more each year? Does anyone have any statistics on this? A more interesting hypothesis might be that #1 is false. There are two things that make for stronger memories: (1) more recalls of a word encode the word better; (2) longer intervals between recalls make words encode better. Perhaps there is an interesting trade-off between these two effects, such that although rarer words are encountered less often, they are better encoded when they are, so that in the end the two effects cancel out and learning continues in a quasi-linear fashion. Edited by patrickwilken on 18 November 2014 at 9:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7211 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 19 18 November 2014 at 10:21am | IP Logged | ||
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An important consideration when looking at vocabulary growth in the formative years is that most children
and young adults have a structured learning environment that pushes them in several directions and towards and through a variety of material. Children spend a lot of their time in a "learning environment". One interesting data point in this paper is that foreign language learners in the target country learn 2500 words in the first six months. My biggest take away is that to continue increasing vocabulary size, continued effort is necessary. My original thought in reading your question is that much of language is like building blocks. Various pieces, words, phrases, ideas, concepts, continue to build upon one another so that for normal students, a lot of vocabulary is acquired indirectly by pushing the boundries of their world and building upon chunks of language and thought already acquired. This is the part that seems to underlie the relatively smooth rate of vocabulary acquisition. More and more complex thoughts and nuance can be formed by adding a few more building blocks. It's really thought itself that reaches a saturation point where a given set of words is sufficient for the task. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5015 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 19 18 November 2014 at 10:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, those are two different things. Sure, we learn a lot of vocabulary by reading.
By listening as well but the vast majority of listening done by learners is a little bit like reading books, it is still fiction. But children do not acquire their new vocabulary from reading only or from listening to movies or coursebook audios. Between the ages 6 and 16, they learn tons of new words at school, such as terminology of natural or social sciences, at home, such as words related to cooking (which most foreign language learners find boring so they get through the not too exhausting chapter in their course asap), they learn lots of words specific for their hobbies, such as musical or sports terminology. And they read as well but it is just a part of their vocabulary acquisition. Most language learners are unlikely to learn the same amounts of words, in my opinion, just because we are not pushed and pulled to all the directions a native child or teenager is. We are not forced to learn things we are not interested in and that we are unlikely to ever use, which is one of the base powers of the formal education chain. Lots of their words are of low frequency. No frequency list drawing from books and newspapers is likely to reflect the real frequency of tons of words in the life of a child or a teenager. Or any native speaker, that's why I take those lists alwys with a grain of salt. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7211 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 4 of 19 18 November 2014 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
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This is an interesting article on
vocabulary and development. It talks about the growth that comes through a nurturing environment where children are allowed to pursue ideas that some would deem "too challenging". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 19 18 November 2014 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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A few observations:
1) the most common words are VERY common, but also fairly complicated syntactically and idiomatically. You'll have to to learn them fast and thoroughly, otherwise you can't use them actively. You may be able to get the gist of some texts based on things like loanwords and context, but to really use the language you need to be familiar with the anonymous 'small' words - so it is lucky for you that they are so common. 2) the rest of the words are so rare that you have to read specialist literature or literary works representing the idiosyncracies of a certain author to see most of those words in print more than a few times. And then you can choose to react to that fact by introducing 'artifical' repetitions with tools like Anki and wordlists, but taking time to note words down or looking them up are also ways to introduced more repetitions - just in a less formal way. But just ignoring them won't help. As I said in Novi Sad: you can skip a word 30 times and still not learn it, but if you see it five times and get irritated you might decide to find out what it means and then you may remember it. 3) To learn words from reading or listening you need to be close to understanding those sources - or in other words: you need to be fairly advanced or use bilingual texts or limit yourself to extremely simple stuff. Besides you need to know a fair number of words in a language to be able to use internal relationships like derivational mechanisms and similar words. And word recall is heavily dependent on the number and quality of your associations, so if the frequency is too low to give you that mesh of relationships then you have to add it deliberately during the memorization phase. 4) A lot of research claims to show that you just can tell people to read and then they will suck up the unknown words like a sponge. But much of that research is dubious because it uses multichoice questions to assess learning success rates - and multichoice tests are too easy. If you ask for precise definitions or translations then it turns out that your testpersons have learned close to nothing. Or in other words: simple unfocused learning simply doesn't work. To learn words you need to choose to focus on at least some of the unknown words and decide to find out what they mean. Edited by Iversen on 19 November 2014 at 12:36am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6871 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 6 of 19 18 November 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Bear in mind many frequency dictionaries only have one version of the word. For
example the word "devenir" is French for "to become". However, you won't see the multiple forms of devenir in the frequency dictionary, only the infinitive so unless you can recognise devient etc as conjugations of devenir and not a new word it would be tricky. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4644 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 7 of 19 19 November 2014 at 1:53am | IP Logged | ||
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My guess is that most of the unknown words which children are exposed to don't stick
even if they read/hear them many times. I'm not sure what would govern 'what sticks" but it's probably related to how useful the word seems. A 12 year old who learns the word "deceive" for example has surely already seen it used more than 50 times. This is probably less likely to happen to adult learners because we don't get as much input. Also the input we get is more likely to be reading, where we're more likely to notice the unknown words and more likely to be able to decode their meaning. Incidentally, I've noticed that it's only after I use an unknown word a few times in the same conversation that my younger siblings (11 and 13) will ask me what it means. Edited by AlexTG on 19 November 2014 at 1:57am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5436 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 19 19 November 2014 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||
We know that in a language like English around 1000 different words will give a coverage around 70- 75% of a written or spoken corpus. This means of course that many words are repeated or common. I think it's important to understand why common words are so common. Words are common for two reasons. First, certain words are classified as grammar words, functional words, connector words or enabling words that are there to hold the words together. These are things traditionally often called articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliaries, etc. And you have the content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives. The grammar words are common for obvious reasons, and, as Iversen has pointed out, it is very important to master these words to understand and to speak the language. Second, certain words are common because they have many meanings. In languages like English, French and Spanish that I know, a few verbs have very many uses and meanings. In English, verbs like be, have, do, make, give, say, take, etc. are very common for this reason. And these words are conjugated to represent number, tenses and aspects. This means that while learning new words is very important it is also important to learn new uses of existing words in your repertoire. This is particularly noticeable in idiomatic expressions where ordinary words are combined into set phrases or multi-word units. This has also led me to argue that a small set of words well used is more useful than a large set poorly mastered. To avoid any arguments, I'll also state that a large set of words well mastered is the best solution. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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