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Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

182 points by tompark 11y ago

PhaseMage 11y ago
The study relies on isochronously spoken words! Inside joke: I recently published a network protocol that relies on sending words isochronously between switches. I'll take this as validation that I'm on to something :-)
voidhorse 11y ago
As someone who is a fan of the generative grammar tradition, that's pretty cool! Going to have to read the full study later, but it sounds like they have some decent results from that press release (though not total evidence for the thesis). Hopefully this finding can contribute toward pushing studies in neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics further. Has some implications for a computational theory of mind too.
yongjik 11y ago
> Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar; rather, it is based on both statistical calculations between words and sound cues to structure. Wait, is this true? There are people who seriously suggest that we don't have an innate notion of grammar?
- gliese1337 11y ago
  Yes, there are. Or at least, that we don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted just to that. The common counter to Chomsky's version of innate grammar is that language is the result of the interaction of a bunch of different cognitive modules which all evolved for different purposes, but which when combined happen to make language possible, and have since been under selection pressure to make language work better. The article doesn't actually provide any support for the "innate" or "universal grammar" hypothesis as it is typically understood, though. This is really about whether the de-facto grammar that emerges from whatever the "language faculty" has a particular hierarchical and recursive structure. And yes, there are people who seriously argue against that, too. The most common alternative model that I have been exposed to is analogical template matching, which actually does a pretty good job at a lot of NLP tasks.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - yongjik 11y ago
    Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this. However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion of "grammar" at all, and everything can be explained better with statistical relations. I find that very hard to accept, and I wonder if a more reasonable position (= there is no special part of brain reserved for learning grammar) was summarized poorly into a much stronger hypothesis. Well, of course, if we reduce everything as much as we like, then we could say everything is about statistical relation of a gazillion variables (or quantum mechanics, if you go far enough). But that's not useful, isn't it? Even if we cannot pinpoint a neuron and say "This neuron will fire if it sees a past perfect!", if the brain as a whole acts like it has an underlying notion of grammar, then I think it's fair to say that it "knows" grammar. And, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that my brain acts like it has some notion of English grammar. :P Edit: Hmm, I think I caused confusion by using the word "innate". Apparently it can mean (1) existing from the time a person or animal is born, and (2) existing as part of the basic nature of something. Chomsky proposes (1), and many disagrees. (I don't find Chomsky's arguments particularly convincing, either.) But the sentence I quoted (which didn't use the word "innate") sounds like it was against (2).
    - brenschluss 11y ago
      Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net. Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?
      - 11y ago
- saurik 11y ago
  I am having a frustrating time finding a good summary of the position, but the branch that studies this is informally known as West Coast Linguistics.
  - andreasvc 11y ago
    That's just one example, construction grammar (not limited to US west coast). The innateness of "universal grammar" can be argued against on evolutionary grounds (how could one universal grammar evolve and end up in the DNA of all humans?), neuroscientifically (how can you encode a fixed grammar when everyone's brain is different and continually changing?), from comparative linguistics (there are many languages and they can be radically different), etc. If it's not about innateness but about the claims of "internal grammar" from the press release then it because less clear that there would be many people who would reject such a position. I think this is a misleading on the part of the press release. Whether something was innate or learned, I think most people would agree that knowledge of language is internalized. So then the question remains whether you call it grammar or something else, and whether statistics plays a part should have no bearing on that if you ask me.
- conistonwater 11y ago
  Yes, sort of, for example: http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-chomsky-didnt-get-about-child.html http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-chomsky-didnt-get-... It depends a lot too on what exactly you mean by innate.
- david_ar 11y ago
  Yes, (most) linguists seem to be unique in treating this as dogma. It's not the only possible explanation consistent with current evidence. Edit: by "innate", people mean that it's something you're born with, rather than learned through experience.
- hyperion2010 11y ago
  Not only are there people who seriously suggest it, but most neuroscientists think Chomsky is completely wrong, and have quite a bit of data to back it up. The notion of innate grammers has been pretty much replaced with evidence that you get much better and more human like performance (and the ability to actually learn the bloody things) out of RNNs and the like. The interesting question is why RNNs are able to produce things that resemble formal languages at first pass.
  - resemblance 11y ago
    An rnns success is related to, and determined by the programmers model of the space.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
    There's a misconception here: deep neural networks are used to learn grammar models, or the features for grammar models and so on, but the predominant model of natural language is still based on grammars. Google "Stanford parser". This is a state of the art natural language parser and like all parsers it relies on a grammar. The grammar it uses is a dependency grammar, a different grammar than the phrase structure grammars proposed by Chomsky and also one that is built in a probabilistic manner, but a grammar nonetheless. Also, it's really not the case that you get better performance out of neural network models of language, let alone "human like performance". We're very far from that still.
    - andreasvc 11y ago
      The Stanford parser does both constituency (phrase-structure) and dependency parsing. Actually in the model that I know of, the dependency parses are derived from the constituency parses. The base of the parser relies on a grammar to describe possible sentence structures, but actually most of the work in disambiguation is done using statistics, or with neural networks. The question what is and what is not grammar is rather arbitrary, there can be a continuum between simple rule-like and statistical regularities. Ultimately the models in NLP are rarely making any kind of cognitive/neuroscientific claim about being plausible models, just effective ones. There's a specific field of computational psycholinguistics which does investigate those things. > Also, it's really not the case that you get better performance out of neural network models of language, let alone "human like performance". We're very far from that still. I wouldn't make such claims these days because deep learning methods are gaining ground very fast. There are many tasks at which the deep learning model is better than traditional models. Furthermore, there are already deep learning models which are better than humans at image labeling.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think this is somewhat visible if you look at any kind of artistic writing. Or realize that grammar is made after the fact. The language itself never follows the grammar perfectly; grammar is a scaffolding we invent to help others learn the language. Hell, you can communicate pretty well by just dropping nouns in sequence. That we have no problems understanding information presented in such way, or maths, or music notation, or programming languages, suggests that we don't have "internal grammars".
mindcrime 11y ago
This appears to be the paper in question: http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf Also, for more background on the idea of the "Universal Grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
- dlwh 11y ago
  Not a neuroscientist, but I do do NLP, and I only lightly skimmed the paper. This doesn't really speak to UG. First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment. Second, they looked at two languages with sentences of up to ~7 syllables each with at most two constituents (Noun Phrase Verb Phrase). You can't show any evidence for any hierarchy of interest in 7 syllables. They demonstrated that phrases exist and phrase boundaries exist, but it's entirely possible to have "flat' grammars without interesting hierarchy, especially in simple sentences. If they want to show interesting hierarchy, they should conduct experiments with more interesting structure (say, some internal PPs and some limited center embedding) and show something that correlates with multiple levels of the "stack" getting popped, or something. It's still interesting work, but as usual oversold by the university press office.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment. That was kinda my impression as well, but I don't want to say much more as I'm so far from an expert on this and I'll probably just make an idiot out of myself. Still, as you say, it is interesting work in its own right.
kazinator 11y ago
I suspect we have a "grammar" which is based on massively parallel pattern matching over a sequence of symbols of bounded length. (I.e. why we deal with ambiguities well, but not long sentences.)
- logicallee 11y ago
  if it's so massively parallel, why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time? why garden path sentences that mislead us as we build up an erroneous parse? sure there's some fuzzy pattern matching, but lexical parsing doesn't seem so massively parallel to me - more like a huge lookup table of fuzzy matches (including whole phrases, I don't have to say much about how I'm never gonna give you up, before that clicks for you), while we're also be parsing lexically with quite a formal grammar. I put a grammar error into the last part of the last sentence purposefully, after I wrote it so you can read it and notice the error explicitly. (Whereas I would expect you to still figure out what I meant.) If it were just pattern matching that grammatical error wouldn't bother you at all even if you notice it, you would just go with the most likely fuzzy interpretation.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    > why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time? Because in English word order is important (in fact, in most languages) It would be fun to learn a completely independent word order language (I suspect Latin is like that) but I suspect this is one of the reasons this aspect died in romance languages, it's harder to understand and relying on word order makes it easier
    - logicallee 11y ago
      so I speak such a language, but I still don't read it in parallel. also this parallel pattern-matching idea doesn't explain sentences that when parsed carefully are clearly ungrammatical: I had inserted an error at the end of my first paragraph of the previous comment to illustrate this.
pazimzadeh 11y ago
> Their results showed that the subjects’ brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time. How are they distinguishing between grammar that's encoded in the brain due to "nature" vs grammar that's encoded in the brain via "nurture"? I think we all knew that the brain has some mechanism to detect grammar.
- deleted 11y ago
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- elcct 11y ago
  Pattern detection. Pattern happens to be grammar.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    However, patterns are language dependent. They don't mention what happened when an English only speaker heard a Chinese phrase.
    - elcct 11y ago
      If you hear long enough of something that is noise first time you hear it, eventually you will distinguish patterns if it is for example Chinese. Brain is pattern recognition machine.
- linhchi 11y ago
  wait, i think that's a good comment. what if that "invisible grammar" they said was the result of the statistical process ? which means that it already emerges in childhood?
- soheil 11y ago
  Your assumption is that all information necessary and sufficient to decode grammar into its constituents is detectable from the spoken words that a child hears. According to Chomsky there is a distinction between the I-Language versus E-Language [1] (internal/ex) namely because grammar in most human languages is not the most computationally efficient way of structuring sentences hence the need for an uniquely human/innate ability [2]. This is also why monkeys can never be trained to learn human language [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar#.22I-Language.22_and_.22E-Language.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar#.22I-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky
DrScump 11y ago
HN discussion from 6 months ago upon the 50th anniversary of the theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762001
MrQuincle 11y ago
I think we also have visual grammars. We are surprised if heavy and large objects are on top of light and small objects. We have priors on lighting and shadows, depth and occlusion, inside and outside. We solve these statistically with complex priors and likelihoods. How much you can shove into the prior is the question of universal grammar. That you are born with linguistic priors is I think not so surprising. If they are of the old-fashioned symbolic variety that Chomsky proposes, would be surprising. It's way too "clean" for my liking, personal opinion!
- cmarschner 11y ago
  I'm not sure about that. A newborn first learns to recognize shapes, then starts exploring its environment using hand-eye coordination. It learns the rules of gravity by watching and feeling. It has a few inborn reflexes, like looking for the source of milk right after birth, but the physics engine seems very much a learnt thing. Also it seems the fundamental physics laws can easily be learnt by a system like the brain (we can even do it with artificial neural nets). Visual cortex seems to be similarly simple. Only for understanding language we have been missing a couple of pieces to the puzzle. That seems still like a miracle. Disclaimer: anecdotal evidence.
  - cma 11y ago
    In experiments, a newborn of a few hours will reflexively dodge/cower from a quickly growing shape circle on a screen (something is approaching and about to collide!). It has no experience at that point of being struck by any moving object or anything like that.
    - illumen 11y ago
      New borns can barely hold their heads up. Shine a light in their eyes, and yes they react. As does everything else with eyes.
      - GotAnyMegadeth 11y ago
        Some animals (and people) with eyes are blind and so probably don't react when you shine a light at them.
palosanto 11y ago
"Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar;" Fascinating article, highly recommended. Not trying to be nitpicky but I'm going to need a citation or few to support some of the claims made about "neuroscientists and psychologists"... just saying.
- phphphph 11y ago
  [Here might be a good start](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures#Criticism...)
- andreasvc 11y ago
  No point in asking for a citation on a press release statement, go directly to the paper (which seems to be much more careful in what it claims).
lorenzhs 11y ago
pdf link, because somehow University press releases never contain references to the actual paper: http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf
_0ffh 11y ago
Well, sooner or later it'll turn out it's all mostly that we're wired to learn grammars; and that we're biased towards learning some types of grammars better than others. (I think evidence has been plenty, even before this.) That's not quite the same as how some people seem to understand Chomsky, a kind of grab-bag of hardwired grammar rules tucked away in some strand of DNA. But still, there it is.
ivan_karamazov 11y ago
Math, computation, grammars, are just models, syntax, that we sometimes use to consciously express things about the world. We could assign syntax to a system composed of whatever thing and say that is Turing-complete or that follows the productions A->B and B->BB of G_1, an imaginary grammar, just because we can assign to it certain symbols as inputs and others as outputs. Numbers, symbols, don't exist in the real world. Math entities only exist as syntax, as human artifacts. They're language entities. That's why they're based on axioms. I don't see the point in saying that syntax is physical - I mean, the neurons firing in our brains because of photons getting in our eyes explain how I recognized the shape of a car, not that a 'hypothetical 2D array' gets 'processed' with some 'gradient-based algorithm' unconsciously in our brain. It doesn't make biological sense. Turing didn't even defined what a symbol or a computation is in terms of Physics, he just made a (very cool and beautiful, by the way) model. Chomsky is simply wrong. He's just thinking here that language is suddenly physical, that we have a grammar-processing CPU in our brains, a form of a Universal Turing Machine! Can this number, '1', be physically somewhere in the world, taking in account modern physics and not some weird Platonism? or we just use it as language to refer to physical entities to talk about them? I do think the latter is the truth. Grammars are math entities which we sometimes use to refer to certain things written in books or other spoken things that just happen to have some physical shape in form of sound waves (words) or even to refer to an imaginary entity we've created with math, just like abstract machines. I don't think there's some weird computational thing going on in my head, that's just an oxymoron. Just neurons firing, blood being pumped, neurotransmitters being sent, in all its glorious and mysterious nature. The mind, on the other hand, exists as a high-level feature of some parts of the bigger brain system, it's caused by real things; that mind that lets us do conscious calculations. But that 'Universal Grammar' wouldn't be inside my mind anyway because it's supposed to be unconscious. It wouldn't be a feature of the mind-spanning parts of the brain anyway. In the end, it's just the whole Nietzschean critique of mistaking language with reality all over again. I cannot recommend John Searle's work on the subject enough, like the book 'The Rediscovery Of The Mind'. He explains all of this way way better than me. P.S: Yes, if you think hard about it, this logically implies that a Strong AI won't ever exist. Sorry, Skynet! P.S.2: Sorry for the long post and possible grammatical mistakes, I'm not a native. And I sincerely hope you enjoyed this post even if you don't agree with me. Have a nice day!

182 points by tompark 11y ago

The study relies on isochronously spoken words! Inside joke: I recently published a network protocol that relies on sending words isochronously between switches. I'll take this as validation that I'm on to something :-)

voidhorse 11y ago

As someone who is a fan of the generative grammar tradition, that's pretty cool! Going to have to read the full study later, but it sounds like they have some decent results from that press release (though not total evidence for the thesis). Hopefully this finding can contribute toward pushing studies in neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics further. Has some implications for a computational theory of mind too.

yongjik 11y ago

> Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar; rather, it is based on both statistical calculations between words and sound cues to structure. Wait, is this true? There are people who seriously suggest that we don't have an innate notion of grammar?

gliese1337 11y ago
Yes, there are. Or at least, that we don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted just to that. The common counter to Chomsky's version of innate grammar is that language is the result of the interaction of a bunch of different cognitive modules which all evolved for different purposes, but which when combined happen to make language possible, and have since been under selection pressure to make language work better. The article doesn't actually provide any support for the "innate" or "universal grammar" hypothesis as it is typically understood, though. This is really about whether the de-facto grammar that emerges from whatever the "language faculty" has a particular hierarchical and recursive structure. And yes, there are people who seriously argue against that, too. The most common alternative model that I have been exposed to is analogical template matching, which actually does a pretty good job at a lot of NLP tasks.
- deleted 11y ago
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- yongjik 11y ago
  Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this. However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion of "grammar" at all, and everything can be explained better with statistical relations. I find that very hard to accept, and I wonder if a more reasonable position (= there is no special part of brain reserved for learning grammar) was summarized poorly into a much stronger hypothesis. Well, of course, if we reduce everything as much as we like, then we could say everything is about statistical relation of a gazillion variables (or quantum mechanics, if you go far enough). But that's not useful, isn't it? Even if we cannot pinpoint a neuron and say "This neuron will fire if it sees a past perfect!", if the brain as a whole acts like it has an underlying notion of grammar, then I think it's fair to say that it "knows" grammar. And, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that my brain acts like it has some notion of English grammar. :P Edit: Hmm, I think I caused confusion by using the word "innate". Apparently it can mean (1) existing from the time a person or animal is born, and (2) existing as part of the basic nature of something. Chomsky proposes (1), and many disagrees. (I don't find Chomsky's arguments particularly convincing, either.) But the sentence I quoted (which didn't use the word "innate") sounds like it was against (2).
  - brenschluss 11y ago
    Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net. Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?
    - 11y ago
saurik 11y ago
I am having a frustrating time finding a good summary of the position, but the branch that studies this is informally known as West Coast Linguistics.
- andreasvc 11y ago
  That's just one example, construction grammar (not limited to US west coast). The innateness of "universal grammar" can be argued against on evolutionary grounds (how could one universal grammar evolve and end up in the DNA of all humans?), neuroscientifically (how can you encode a fixed grammar when everyone's brain is different and continually changing?), from comparative linguistics (there are many languages and they can be radically different), etc. If it's not about innateness but about the claims of "internal grammar" from the press release then it because less clear that there would be many people who would reject such a position. I think this is a misleading on the part of the press release. Whether something was innate or learned, I think most people would agree that knowledge of language is internalized. So then the question remains whether you call it grammar or something else, and whether statistics plays a part should have no bearing on that if you ask me.
conistonwater 11y ago
Yes, sort of, for example: http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-chomsky-didnt-get-about-child.html http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-chomsky-didnt-get-... It depends a lot too on what exactly you mean by innate.
david_ar 11y ago
Yes, (most) linguists seem to be unique in treating this as dogma. It's not the only possible explanation consistent with current evidence. Edit: by "innate", people mean that it's something you're born with, rather than learned through experience.
hyperion2010 11y ago
Not only are there people who seriously suggest it, but most neuroscientists think Chomsky is completely wrong, and have quite a bit of data to back it up. The notion of innate grammers has been pretty much replaced with evidence that you get much better and more human like performance (and the ability to actually learn the bloody things) out of RNNs and the like. The interesting question is why RNNs are able to produce things that resemble formal languages at first pass.
- resemblance 11y ago
  An rnns success is related to, and determined by the programmers model of the space.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
  There's a misconception here: deep neural networks are used to learn grammar models, or the features for grammar models and so on, but the predominant model of natural language is still based on grammars. Google "Stanford parser". This is a state of the art natural language parser and like all parsers it relies on a grammar. The grammar it uses is a dependency grammar, a different grammar than the phrase structure grammars proposed by Chomsky and also one that is built in a probabilistic manner, but a grammar nonetheless. Also, it's really not the case that you get better performance out of neural network models of language, let alone "human like performance". We're very far from that still.
  - andreasvc 11y ago
    The Stanford parser does both constituency (phrase-structure) and dependency parsing. Actually in the model that I know of, the dependency parses are derived from the constituency parses. The base of the parser relies on a grammar to describe possible sentence structures, but actually most of the work in disambiguation is done using statistics, or with neural networks. The question what is and what is not grammar is rather arbitrary, there can be a continuum between simple rule-like and statistical regularities. Ultimately the models in NLP are rarely making any kind of cognitive/neuroscientific claim about being plausible models, just effective ones. There's a specific field of computational psycholinguistics which does investigate those things. > Also, it's really not the case that you get better performance out of neural network models of language, let alone "human like performance". We're very far from that still. I wouldn't make such claims these days because deep learning methods are gaining ground very fast. There are many tasks at which the deep learning model is better than traditional models. Furthermore, there are already deep learning models which are better than humans at image labeling.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I think this is somewhat visible if you look at any kind of artistic writing. Or realize that grammar is made after the fact. The language itself never follows the grammar perfectly; grammar is a scaffolding we invent to help others learn the language. Hell, you can communicate pretty well by just dropping nouns in sequence. That we have no problems understanding information presented in such way, or maths, or music notation, or programming languages, suggests that we don't have "internal grammars".

mindcrime 11y ago

This appears to be the paper in question: http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf Also, for more background on the idea of the "Universal Grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

dlwh 11y ago
Not a neuroscientist, but I do do NLP, and I only lightly skimmed the paper. This doesn't really speak to UG. First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment. Second, they looked at two languages with sentences of up to ~7 syllables each with at most two constituents (Noun Phrase Verb Phrase). You can't show any evidence for any hierarchy of interest in 7 syllables. They demonstrated that phrases exist and phrase boundaries exist, but it's entirely possible to have "flat' grammars without interesting hierarchy, especially in simple sentences. If they want to show interesting hierarchy, they should conduct experiments with more interesting structure (say, some internal PPs and some limited center embedding) and show something that correlates with multiple levels of the "stack" getting popped, or something. It's still interesting work, but as usual oversold by the university press office.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment. That was kinda my impression as well, but I don't want to say much more as I'm so far from an expert on this and I'll probably just make an idiot out of myself. Still, as you say, it is interesting work in its own right.

kazinator 11y ago

I suspect we have a "grammar" which is based on massively parallel pattern matching over a sequence of symbols of bounded length. (I.e. why we deal with ambiguities well, but not long sentences.)

logicallee 11y ago
if it's so massively parallel, why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time? why garden path sentences that mislead us as we build up an erroneous parse? sure there's some fuzzy pattern matching, but lexical parsing doesn't seem so massively parallel to me - more like a huge lookup table of fuzzy matches (including whole phrases, I don't have to say much about how I'm never gonna give you up, before that clicks for you), while we're also be parsing lexically with quite a formal grammar. I put a grammar error into the last part of the last sentence purposefully, after I wrote it so you can read it and notice the error explicitly. (Whereas I would expect you to still figure out what I meant.) If it were just pattern matching that grammatical error wouldn't bother you at all even if you notice it, you would just go with the most likely fuzzy interpretation.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  > why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time? Because in English word order is important (in fact, in most languages) It would be fun to learn a completely independent word order language (I suspect Latin is like that) but I suspect this is one of the reasons this aspect died in romance languages, it's harder to understand and relying on word order makes it easier
  - logicallee 11y ago
    so I speak such a language, but I still don't read it in parallel. also this parallel pattern-matching idea doesn't explain sentences that when parsed carefully are clearly ungrammatical: I had inserted an error at the end of my first paragraph of the previous comment to illustrate this.

pazimzadeh 11y ago

> Their results showed that the subjects’ brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time. How are they distinguishing between grammar that's encoded in the brain due to "nature" vs grammar that's encoded in the brain via "nurture"? I think we all knew that the brain has some mechanism to detect grammar.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
elcct 11y ago
Pattern detection. Pattern happens to be grammar.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  However, patterns are language dependent. They don't mention what happened when an English only speaker heard a Chinese phrase.
  - elcct 11y ago
    If you hear long enough of something that is noise first time you hear it, eventually you will distinguish patterns if it is for example Chinese. Brain is pattern recognition machine.
linhchi 11y ago
wait, i think that's a good comment. what if that "invisible grammar" they said was the result of the statistical process ? which means that it already emerges in childhood?
soheil 11y ago
Your assumption is that all information necessary and sufficient to decode grammar into its constituents is detectable from the spoken words that a child hears. According to Chomsky there is a distinction between the I-Language versus E-Language [1] (internal/ex) namely because grammar in most human languages is not the most computationally efficient way of structuring sentences hence the need for an uniquely human/innate ability [2]. This is also why monkeys can never be trained to learn human language [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar#.22I-Language.22_and_.22E-Language.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar#.22I-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

DrScump 11y ago

HN discussion from 6 months ago upon the 50th anniversary of the theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762001

MrQuincle 11y ago

I think we also have visual grammars. We are surprised if heavy and large objects are on top of light and small objects. We have priors on lighting and shadows, depth and occlusion, inside and outside. We solve these statistically with complex priors and likelihoods. How much you can shove into the prior is the question of universal grammar. That you are born with linguistic priors is I think not so surprising. If they are of the old-fashioned symbolic variety that Chomsky proposes, would be surprising. It's way too "clean" for my liking, personal opinion!

cmarschner 11y ago
I'm not sure about that. A newborn first learns to recognize shapes, then starts exploring its environment using hand-eye coordination. It learns the rules of gravity by watching and feeling. It has a few inborn reflexes, like looking for the source of milk right after birth, but the physics engine seems very much a learnt thing. Also it seems the fundamental physics laws can easily be learnt by a system like the brain (we can even do it with artificial neural nets). Visual cortex seems to be similarly simple. Only for understanding language we have been missing a couple of pieces to the puzzle. That seems still like a miracle. Disclaimer: anecdotal evidence.
- cma 11y ago
  In experiments, a newborn of a few hours will reflexively dodge/cower from a quickly growing shape circle on a screen (something is approaching and about to collide!). It has no experience at that point of being struck by any moving object or anything like that.
  - illumen 11y ago
    New borns can barely hold their heads up. Shine a light in their eyes, and yes they react. As does everything else with eyes.
    - GotAnyMegadeth 11y ago
      Some animals (and people) with eyes are blind and so probably don't react when you shine a light at them.

palosanto 11y ago

"Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar;" Fascinating article, highly recommended. Not trying to be nitpicky but I'm going to need a citation or few to support some of the claims made about "neuroscientists and psychologists"... just saying.

phphphph 11y ago
[Here might be a good start](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures#Criticism...)
andreasvc 11y ago
No point in asking for a citation on a press release statement, go directly to the paper (which seems to be much more careful in what it claims).

lorenzhs 11y ago

pdf link, because somehow University press releases never contain references to the actual paper: http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf

_0ffh 11y ago

Well, sooner or later it'll turn out it's all mostly that we're wired to learn grammars; and that we're biased towards learning some types of grammars better than others. (I think evidence has been plenty, even before this.) That's not quite the same as how some people seem to understand Chomsky, a kind of grab-bag of hardwired grammar rules tucked away in some strand of DNA. But still, there it is.

ivan_karamazov 11y ago

Math, computation, grammars, are just models, syntax, that we sometimes use to consciously express things about the world. We could assign syntax to a system composed of whatever thing and say that is Turing-complete or that follows the productions A->B and B->BB of G_1, an imaginary grammar, just because we can assign to it certain symbols as inputs and others as outputs. Numbers, symbols, don't exist in the real world. Math entities only exist as syntax, as human artifacts. They're language entities. That's why they're based on axioms. I don't see the point in saying that syntax is physical - I mean, the neurons firing in our brains because of photons getting in our eyes explain how I recognized the shape of a car, not that a 'hypothetical 2D array' gets 'processed' with some 'gradient-based algorithm' unconsciously in our brain. It doesn't make biological sense. Turing didn't even defined what a symbol or a computation is in terms of Physics, he just made a (very cool and beautiful, by the way) model. Chomsky is simply wrong. He's just thinking here that language is suddenly physical, that we have a grammar-processing CPU in our brains, a form of a Universal Turing Machine! Can this number, '1', be physically somewhere in the world, taking in account modern physics and not some weird Platonism? or we just use it as language to refer to physical entities to talk about them? I do think the latter is the truth. Grammars are math entities which we sometimes use to refer to certain things written in books or other spoken things that just happen to have some physical shape in form of sound waves (words) or even to refer to an imaginary entity we've created with math, just like abstract machines. I don't think there's some weird computational thing going on in my head, that's just an oxymoron. Just neurons firing, blood being pumped, neurotransmitters being sent, in all its glorious and mysterious nature. The mind, on the other hand, exists as a high-level feature of some parts of the bigger brain system, it's caused by real things; that mind that lets us do conscious calculations. But that 'Universal Grammar' wouldn't be inside my mind anyway because it's supposed to be unconscious. It wouldn't be a feature of the mind-spanning parts of the brain anyway. In the end, it's just the whole Nietzschean critique of mistaking language with reality all over again. I cannot recommend John Searle's work on the subject enough, like the book 'The Rediscovery Of The Mind'. He explains all of this way way better than me. P.S: Yes, if you think hard about it, this logically implies that a Strong AI won't ever exist. Sorry, Skynet! P.S.2: Sorry for the long post and possible grammatical mistakes, I'm not a native. And I sincerely hope you enjoyed this post even if you don't agree with me. Have a nice day!