The following post deals with learning, knowledge and memory. It details the way humans learn language and assimilate grammatical technicalities to form phrases that depict their ideas. It also deals with the aspects of age and mental maturity, and how they affect learning processes.
—
Linguists studying the aspects of recognition and cognition regarding languages will tell you that younger children tend to absorb the structure of their native language (or any other) at a rate faster than their elders. You will have noticed that a child of 2-3 years will absorb the nuances of its native tongue in a matter of months – while once adolescence is passed, structured classes and guidance become necessary to do the same. Although this theory is only empirical to me, it is quite established in scientific circles with adequate proof to back it up. I would like to extend this same argument to one more facet of learning: that of expanding one’s grammar to accommodate newer words.
Here, before I continue, I’d like to introduce something called the grammatical circle of words. This circle represents all the words recognised by an individual as being usable on an everyday basis for him or her. To rephrase, these words will constitute a lexicon. The area of this circle will increase rapidly at the younger phases of one’s life, as detailed in the first paragraph of this post. The newborn child will go from knowing no language to knowing one in the span of a year, and the circle will expand from zero volume to a finitely large one. Bracketing this transformation will be a learning period in which the child will learn about all types of words, sentence structures and idea constructions. The act of pointing to an apple and crying will now become replaceable by “I want that apple because I’m hungry.” In this period, there will be a momentum that will characterize how fast the child learns such things. I could define it like this.
A1 = Initial number of words; A2 = Final number of words.
M = [ { ( A2 – A1 ) x 100 } / ( 365 x A1 ) ]
(i.e. Momentum = Percentage increase in number of words averaged over 1 year)
If the momentum is high (over a suitably long period of time), the child will have learnt 500 words as compared to another child with lesser momentum that learnt 300 words (example). My idea is that greater the momentum during this period, slower will be the acquisition of newer words later in life. By this, I mean that if the grammatical circle of words expanded very quickly in the earlier stages of one’s life, it will be more rigid towards the final cognitive stages. Now, let me give my explanation for it.
Say I learnt 1,000 words before I was 5. As a child of between 5 and 10 years of age, my circle of 1,000 words will be sufficient to detail to myself and to others what I see, hear and feel. If I find that there is a new experience that seems incapable of being described through the words I already know, I will learn a new word – “ostentatiously gregarious” the 1,001st – to be able to use the language more effectively. At this point, suppose I have a friend whom I’ve known for a long time, and that he’s displayed a larger momentum of learning. At the age of 5, if he knows 2,000 words, then it should suffice for him to not acquire any new words till, say, he’s 15. Growing up together, I’ll find that I’m learning new words at the rate of 10 per year while he is grammatically dormant. Now, at the age of 20, if I find that I need to learn 5 new words for a job I’m applying to, I’ll find it easier than him. Why? Because the momentum which I said bracketed the learning period is still greater than zero for me, so the learning period involved is longer for me than for my friend. His circle will have been completed will mine will still be expanding. I can accommodate, he can’t.
All of this is based on an (empirical) assumption on my part that the learning process I keep referring to happens only once in one’s life. Once it dies out (at an age corresponding to the completion of one’s postgraduate education), newer experiences no longer seem like solutions to remember but problems to tackle. At these stages, what has already been learnt yearns to be put into use, i.e. the application-oriented years of life. If the learning process is spread out through these first 20-25 years, the amount of knowledge is greater than when the process spans about 10-15 years. This could be because what we learn is encoded away in our memories as a collection of sights and sounds. If I were to read in a book the word “gregarious” at the age of 12 and know its meaning through the context of its usage, I will remember it for the next few years only when I can remember the context itself. If I were to encounter the same word when a friend of mine describes someone else so when I am 18, I will remember it for a longer time. The difference in these two cases is that, although the learning period is in effect, the latter is remembered in more forms than the former. When I am 50, there is a better chance of me recollecting something that has a sight, sound and texture associated with it than that which is triggered by the name of the book or a character in it.
When reading a piece of text that seems too hard to remember, one tends to ascribe the whole picture it brings to mind to a memory that is readily accessible by “mugging” it. When this happens, nerves in the head keep firing signals in a particular channel. With repetitive firing, the cognitive system tends to identify that particular channel as one that will be regular use and therefore keep it active. You will be able to better understand this phenomenon when you associate it with some languages in your life whose words you are slowly forgetting because you don’t use them often. Similarly, when a person grows older, his responsibilities also multiply given that fact that he will now have the physical strength to execute them. To supplant this strength, he will begin to use his past experiences as lessons so he learns to optimize his own performance. At these stages, what he has taught himself will now come forth in the form of actions and decisions. The nerves will now begin to fire in those channels that seem most necessary for that supplementation (some lessons will seem more useful than others).
If I had stopped learning new words at the age of 12, then the application-oriented stages of life will set in prematurely, and the nerves will begin to decode rather than continuing to encode. Due to the said prematurity, the necessity to learn a new word because of a strange experience will now tend to be tackled by using older words. So, since I’m 12, I’ll use the phrase “moves freely with people” instead of the word “gregarious”; at the same time, my 18 year old friend will learn it. Analogously, when I am 18, I may not be able to properly define the word gregarious. The Venn diagram should help you.
The probability of recollection
If an event ‘A’ is associated with both sight and sound, {x,y} depicting the occurrence of the sight-event and sound-event being fired (resp., through Boolean logic), then one of the following will happen when the memory will need to be recollected:
- {0,0}
- {0,1}
- {1,0}
- {1,1}
Therefore, there is a 75% chance that ‘A’ will be remembered by the person. If, however, an event ‘B’ is associated with only sight (like a word being encountered in a novel), then there is only a 50% chance of its recollection:
- {1}
- {0}
Phew! I learnt a lot there!
Clathration Therapy 