https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_vision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_vision I think it's a quite nice analogy. There are structures present, bu

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_vision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_vision I think it's a quite nice analogy. There are structures present, but they have to be trained as well. Suppose you have a hierarchical Dirichlet process as prior, you still need data to be able to define what clusters with what. And of course I won't postulate such a simple process as representing our newborn brains. From Wikipedia: "At birth, visual structures are fully present yet immature in their potentials. From the first moment of life, there are a few innate components of an infant's visual system. Newborns can detect changes in brightness, distinguish between stationary and kinetic objects, as well as follow kinetic objects in their visual fields. However, many of these areas are very poorly developed." Your extreme case would be that there is a priori no reason to have language processed in certain parts of the brain, like Broca's or Wernicke's regions. It is of course possible that these are just strategically located. However, newborns with damage to these regions by oxygen deprevation at birth can already suffer from linguistic impairments.