In the whimsical world of word learning, what makes a word an easy nut to crack? Researchers set out to uncover the secrets by exploring the relationship between predictability and the age at which children start using different words. Using intricate language models, they measured the surprisal or unexpectedness of words in child-directed speech. Turns out, predictability plays a crucial role! The more predictable a word is from its context, the earlier children tend to produce it. But here’s the catch: predictability varied depending on the type of word. Function words and predicates showed positive correlation with age of acquisition (AoA) whereas nouns didn’t follow this trend. What’s more, differences in predictability across languages explained cross-linguistic variations in AoA. This discovery shines a light on how children conquer the challenging landscape of language learning!

Abstract
What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word’s surprisal in child-directed speech, computed using n-gram and long-short-term-memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better predictor than predictability derived from n-gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross-linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable.

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