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Word freqs vs Word learning: Paradox? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Mozzo Newbie United States Joined 3666 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 19 09 December 2014 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||
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When I think about my own learning in elementary school, I went from reading "The Cat
in the Hat" and "Curious George" kinds of books in 3rd grade - to Jules Verne, the Chronicles of Narnia, etc. by 6th grade. Somewhere in this stage I moved from reading the comics in the newspaper to the actual articles, even picking up copies of TIME and Newsweek and following current events. Very rarely did I open a dictionary. Somehow I must have determined the meanings of thousands of words on my own, by context. I remember in English composition class, each book chapter had a vocabulary list, but that was maybe 40 words a lesson and a dozen lessons a year. Most of my L1 gain had to come from outside structured classes. That's why I think vocabulary acquisition is a "get a head of steam" effect. Once you establish that 95% or so range you can just plow on, building up from one source after another. Edited by Mozzo on 09 December 2014 at 3:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5065 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 18 of 19 14 December 2014 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
Interesting discussion! I think the reason this doesn't check out is that (1), (2), and (3) are all approximations, and even the researches who demonstrated them wouldn't claim that they are universally true in the way that would be required for this kind of inference to work. You need to encounter a word 6-50 times to remember it. Yes, there is a literature on memory that suggests this. But the situations those researchers study aren't fully representative of what children experience. For example, there is a phenomenon called "fast mapping" where, under certain conditions unlike those in a memory experiment, children can remember a word after just one exposure (It's not clear how much this happens in the real world, or whether the information they remember is something less than having "learned the word"). The likelihood of encountering a word drops off very quickly for lower frequency words (exponentially?). This is basically a result from corpus linguistics, which averages over a bunch of texts to give the frequency of a word. Under this model, some words are quite infrequent, less than one in a million. However, it's not the case that you have to wait for six million more words before you hear them again. Texts and conversations are structured so that even a very infrequent word, if it is used once, is likely to be used again soon. Those multiple- exposure events are the times when infrequent words are likely to be learned. For example, I went over 20 years in the US without learning the word 'cherpumple.' Then yesterday, someone I know made a cherpumple (it's a cake stuffed with a cherry pie, a pumpkin pie, and an apple pie) and I heard the word several times that day- a lot more than six- and I was able to learn an infrequent word. Children throughout their childhood learn about 1000 new words every year. This is only approximately true-- there is a period in middle childhood where the rate of word learning is pretty close to constant, but it does start slower in early childhood when they're still picking up the basics, and it slows down again later in life once almost all the frequent words are already learned. (so the predicted low-frequency effect does kick in eventually, only later than you expected from the original assumptions). Edited by robarb on 14 December 2014 at 12:42am 5 persons have 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 19 of 19 31 December 2014 at 9:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Wheb I do wordlists I have met a given word at least once in my source (and probable sevral times before that where I didn't retain the word), and if I have looked it up or checked it in a translation that counts for at least one exposure more. When I put it into a wordlists I write it once, and then I may check its meaning once more and I definitely do something to memorize it, after which I write the original once more. Later I do a repetition round were I write both the word itself and a translation, and I regresh my associations.
All in all I get my 6 repetitions (or more) just by running through this procedure which I can do while watching TV or listening to music. But as an inveterate word collector I also know that passive knowledge (being able to recognize and decode the word) isn't the same as being able to recall the word at will. For that it takes some active use of the language. Or in other words: the whole idea that the number of exposures as a simple number tells you all you need to know about the memorization process is wrong. You also need to take into consideration what you DO with a given word. And if your life depends on remembering a given word your chances of learning may be greater than if you just see it among thousands of other words in a novel. Which may explain why I remembered precisely the words "мороженое" (ice cream) and "Пекси-кола" after my first visit to Russia in 1975. Edited by Iversen on 31 December 2014 at 9:16am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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