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 tra...