Children, but not language models, show accelerating returns in word learning
arXiv:2608.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Children learn hundreds of words over the first years of their lives, in a process that begins slowly but quickly picks up speed. Prior models describe vocabulary growth as evidence accumulation over time. Here we show that the process is best characterized as accelerating accumulation: children learn more from each additional unit of linguistic experience than they did from the one before. In contrast to children, language models -- even those trained on child-directed speech -- do not accelerate. Instead, they show constant proportional returns on new data, consistent with scaling laws. Children learn using many orders of magnitude less training data than language models; their increasingly efficient use of their learning input is a candidate explanation.
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[Submitted on 17 Aug 2026]
Title:Children, but not language models, show accelerating returns in word learning
View a PDF of the paper titled Children, but not language models, show accelerating returns in word learning, by Michael C. Frank
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Abstract:Children learn hundreds of words over the first years of their lives, in a process that begins slowly but quickly picks up speed. Prior models describe vocabulary growth as evidence accumulation over time. Here we show that the process is best characterized as accelerating accumulation: children learn more from each additional unit of linguistic experience than they did from the one before. In contrast to children, language models -- even those trained on child-directed speech -- do not accelerate. Instead, they show constant proportional returns on new data, consistent with scaling laws. Children learn using many orders of magnitude less training data than language models; their increasingly efficient use of their learning input is a candidate explanation.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.17120 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.17120v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.17120
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Michael Frank [view email] [v1] Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:55:30 UTC (1,142 KB)
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