Learning from an 18 month old
Being an Information and Communication Scientist, I have been paying close attention to the how my 18 month old daughter, Arya is learning to “communicate”. I use quotes around the word communicate because when Arya first started talking, what she was communicating to us (me and my wife) probably would have made no sense to anyone else.
All parents tend to be interested in comparing their child to others whether it is about height and weight, or other major milestones during their growth. I have been particularly fascinated by how much Arya can talk. According to Baby Talk magazine, children are supposed to know 5 to 10 words by the time they are fifteen months old. At fifteen months, we could easily recall more than 120 words in Arya’s vocabulary. Even though she is in the 10th percentile for height and weight for US growth chart, she is definitely off the charts when it comes to speaking.
Learning hundreds of words at such early age is impressive, but being able to put several words into a meaningful sentence is incredible. In the past few weeks (at 18 months), Arya has started to put several words together. Two weeks ago, she totally suprised us by saying “I did it mommy”. These four words may not seem that complicated, but if you start analyzing the amount of processing that takes place in the brain to put these four words together, it is astounding. She has used up to 5 words in a sentence so far.
As scientists we love numbers and theories. So here is one:
For simplicity sake, let’s say that Arya has hundred words in her vocabulary (even though that number is much higher now). If she uses one word to express herself, she has to choose from hundred different possibilities. You may be wondering, big deal. But, let’s see what happens when she uses more than one word. In order to use two words, for example, “big bus”, she has one hundred options for the first word and another one hundred for the second, giving ten thousand combinations. The following chart shows how this number grows exponentially as she puts more and more words together:
#Words Total combination of words
1 100
2 10000
3 1000000
4 100000000
5 10000000000
Even with only 5 words in a sentence and a vocabulary of 100 words, we are up to 10 billion combinations. That’s right, ten billion! I realize that this is less than the 50 trillion calculations that ORNL Jaguar supercomputer can do per second, but I think she is getting really close.
So, is Arya really smart (I would like to think so), or is it because she spends most of her time with her mom that makes her the way she is? Maybe we could do an experiment that would give us the "right" answer.
Stay tuned for more postings on this topic. For now, if you want to see Arya's progress, you can visit her own blog .