Plato's+Problem

How do we we acquire so much knowledge on the basis of so little information?
Landauer & Dumais (2004): "A typical American seventh grader knows the meaning of 10-15 words today that she didn't know yesterday" (p. 2). Most of these words must have been acquired through reading because the majority of English words are used only in print, and she has already acquired the full complement of oral vocabulary; **however,** she has acquired less than one word through direct instruction since yesterday.

About one word for every twenty paragraphs read in a school text goes from wrong to right on a vocabulary test. Yet the typical seventh grader would have read fewer than 50 paragraphs since yesterday. How did she acquire these words she didn't encounter?

Plato's solution for this "**mystery of excessive knowledge**" is that people are born with most of their knowledge and need only hints or contemplation to retrieve it.

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What is SLA - Latent Semantic Analysis

Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (2004). A solution to Plato's problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of acquisition, induction and representation of knowledge. Available at http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/plato/plato.annote.html.