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> Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar; rather, it

by 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
  [deleted]
- 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?
    - yongjik 11y ago
      I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity. Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.) Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that. Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?
      - brenschluss 11y ago
        Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope? My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar. The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1] [1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
- atdt 11y ago
  I am not aware of Chomsky ever making the argument that language has a specific physical location with the brain, or that it is the achievement of a single organ which evolved for exactly this purpose. You may be confusing Chomsky with Jerry Fodor, whose "Modularity of Mind" was inspired by Chomsky's ideas (which it helped popularize).
- linhchi 11y ago
  Thanks for the second point. It's frustrated when they write titles like that for the public. I always think that "human is born with some miracle thing" is quite suspicious. How can orderliness be born out of no where (no work spent, no energy consumed)? The probability of orderliness to be spontaneously assembled itself must be infinitesimally small. Grammar might evolve along the way (due to statistical learning) but it seems too good to be true if it's born out of no where.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Giving birth to a human child is not trivial. Lots of assembly required. DNA is pretty complex, and the process of motherhood is not just waiting for nine months and delivering a miracle.
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".

by yongjik 11y ago

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
[deleted]
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?
  - yongjik 11y ago
    I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity. Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.) Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that. Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?
    - brenschluss 11y ago
      Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope? My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar. The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1] [1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
atdt 11y ago
I am not aware of Chomsky ever making the argument that language has a specific physical location with the brain, or that it is the achievement of a single organ which evolved for exactly this purpose. You may be confusing Chomsky with Jerry Fodor, whose "Modularity of Mind" was inspired by Chomsky's ideas (which it helped popularize).
linhchi 11y ago
Thanks for the second point. It's frustrated when they write titles like that for the public. I always think that "human is born with some miracle thing" is quite suspicious. How can orderliness be born out of no where (no work spent, no energy consumed)? The probability of orderliness to be spontaneously assembled itself must be infinitesimally small. Grammar might evolve along the way (due to statistical learning) but it seems too good to be true if it's born out of no where.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Giving birth to a human child is not trivial. Lots of assembly required. DNA is pretty complex, and the process of motherhood is not just waiting for nine months and delivering a miracle.

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".