Recent news suggests that the explosive vocabulary of a toddler, called "word spurt," might be explained as a form of code breaking, analogous to solving a puzzle. Specifically that children do not learn the words being provided in sequence, one at a time, but that they are processing many common pieces of the puzzle in parallel. The model suggests that once some pieces of the puzzle are figured out, then by process of elimination other pieces may be put into place.
It's amazing to realize that each little child is performing an operation that might be as hard or harder than Turing cracking the German Enigma cipher in World War II. As a game designer, it's also fascinating that the puzzle-solution metaphor might be an apt fit for a model of a toddler's first language acquisition. As there are user interface, task decomposition, reinforcing feedback, tutorial, and learning curve techniques through which a designer teaches a new player the rules to a game, or facilitate the solving of a novel puzzle, there may be some lessons that game design can impart to first language acquisition. And vice versa: that the techniques of language acquisition can impart patterns applicable to designing puzzles with approachable solutions.
Human language learning and the Enigma cipher: Both are decoding complex signals through stages of mappings.
