
Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language - laurex
https://www.livescience.com/65108-brain-megabyte-storage-for-language.html
======
eindiran
The claim is poorly phrased in the headline. From the article
([https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181393](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181393)),
you are exposed to around 2000 bits of language-related information each day,
which apparently adds up to about 1.5 Mb by the time you turn 18 (an entirely
arbitrary cutoff in the world of studying language acquisition).

This has some interesting interplay with the idea that your brain has a lot of
the necessary machinery for learning language built-in from birth. We aren't
exposed to that much data before we get reasonably good at language
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus)).
That helps account for the fact that you are exposed to so little (around a
flop-disk's worth, according to the authors) data, but learn so quickly. Most
linguists (but not all) subscribe to this idea, known as UG
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar)).

What's interesting is that most UG people argue that your brain encodes
morphosyntactic stuff via UG, and the authors of this paper state that most of
the data they're counting in their 1.5 Mb figure is lexical semantic info.

