[Source: Science Daily]

But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that language acquisition between birth and 18 is a remarkable feat of cognition, rather than something humans are just hardwired to do.

Researchers calculated that, from infancy to young adulthood, learners absorb approximately 12.5 million bits of information about language — about two bits per minute — to fully acquire linguistic knowledge. If converted into binary code, the data would fill a 1.5 MB floppy disk, the study found.

The findings, published today in the Royal Society Open Sciencejournal, challenge assumptions that human language acquisition happens effortlessly, and that robots would have an easy time mastering it.

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