Storage parsimony vs. computing parsimony

[Wallace Chafe]

Dear Bill,

I don't have any very complete answer to your question, but, for one
thing, I think it is well established that children learn huge amounts of
vocabulary over a relatively short period of time.  Even Pinker mentioned
this in The Language Instinct, and I think he provided a reference or two.

Furthermore, in working with a couple polysynthetic languages over many
years, it has become quite clear to me that people learn huge numbers of
those long words by rote, often relating them to the particular situations
where they first heard them.  To a large extent they to not CONSTRUCT them
according to some system a linguist might suppose they use.  They ARE able
to come up with neologisms from time to time, but more by analogy, and by
applying some simplified patterns quite different from what linguists come
up with.

This is a question I'm much interested in too, and I'll also be happy to
hear of research in this direction.

Wally Chafe