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Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning

149 points by doppp 10y ago

fsloth 10y ago
"I have not failed, I have just learned thousands of of ways which don't work" applies to science as well. It bothers me popular science often presents ground breaking work as a direct competitor to an established theory, while usually the established theory is a necessary stepping stone to the new one. usually, because it's more obvious approach and explains some aspects of the system. The old theory can be used as an instrument to gauge the qualities of the system under observation, and incompatibilities found provide then fertile material for new understanding.
- cossatot 10y ago
  Unfortunately, this is often the rhetorical approach commonly employed in unpopular, ahem, professional science as well. No one wants incremental progress, everything has to be transformative (science's disruptive). Fortunately, this has yet to pervade other industries we all know and love.
mturmon 10y ago
Anyone else feel that ending the first section with the well-known "science progresses one funeral at a time" quote is rather too sharply pointed, given Chomsky's age?
- AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
  He's earned it.
- dilemma 10y ago
  Yes, I felt it to be extremely poor taste.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Whether it is or not, I suspect you'd have to take the question up with Thomas Kuhn.
cma 10y ago
The article makes it sound like Chomsky's early approach was similar to the grammar you learn in school. That's actually what linguistic classification was like before Chomsky as I understand it. It's first mention of recursion is of a Chomsky paper from 2002, where everything is done with just a few rules, but recursion was also critical to Chomsky's earliest results. Coming away reading it I would think Chomsky had a really naive approach that had to be modified with Principles and Parameters just to handle Spanish first person verbs, because his program was so narrow they hadn't bothered to consider Spanish. Then it wasn't until 2002 that they started handling recursion. It doesn't quite say that directly, but that is just what I think someone might take away from reading the intro.
rflrob 10y ago
>In the second half of the 20th century, it was becoming ever clearer that our unique evolutionary history was responsible for many aspects of our unique human psychology In my experience, most "evolutionary psychology" stories are also ad hoc, unfalsifiable at best, and loaded with cultural biases from those who propose them. We don't have a good idea of what traits actually carry a selective advantage, and those advantages are often highly context dependent. The brain, culture, and evolution are both incredibly complex, and so you can often find some way to smush puzzle pieces together that almost works, but that doesn't mean that's what's actually happening.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Correct A lot of traits and variances have no clear evolutionary advantage, most of the time it's fudging and trying to come up with an explanation for a certain behaviour There aren't good evolutionary explanations for a lot of physical traits, let alone for psychological ones
Ologn 10y ago
> when linguists actually went looking at the variation in languages across the world, they found counterexamples to the claim that this type of recursion was an essential property of language. Some languages—the Amazonian Pirahã, for instance—seem to get by without Chomskyan recursion. This is a pretty thin counter-example. A Christian missionary who became a linguist claimed that the Pirahã language had recursion. Then he later claimed that it did not have recursion. Linguists went down to study the Pirahã and found out that his first reports of Pirahã being recursive were correct, as they observed recursion in Pirahã language when they were there. The authors return to this language spoken by less than 400 people later on: > Chomsky defenders have responded that just because a language lacks a certain tool—recursion, for example—does not mean that it is not in the tool kit... makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in places they verge on the unfalsifiable. Recursion in languages has not been falsified - it has been found in all languages, including Pirahã.
- andreasvc 10y ago
  There is no consensus about this question. Both sides clearly have an ax to grind. Everett knows the language best, so I'd lend more credence to his judgment. Regardless of the answer, it only means that Chomsky's theory that everything is about recursion may or may not have been falsified, not that it is a good theory.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  I think you're giving Dan Everett (the person you're describing) a short shrift here. He says that his initial pro-recursion reports were attempting to fit Pirahã into the standard Chomskyian UG framework of the time. However, as he learned the language better, he started to realize that it didn't really fit and he was seeing the things he expected to see. For example, he initially described -sai as a nominializer (an "adapter" that lets other parts of speech be used in constructions that expect a noun). His later reports argue that it's actually not a nominalizer, but marks old information ("As you know Bob"). As far as I know, there is not actually a ton of non-Everett data on Pirahã. The most well-known paper that disagrees with Everett is probably Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (2009), which reanalyzes Everett's published work. They start with a list of properties are are supposedly unique to Pirahã, and claim that many of these show up in familiar languages. However, I don't find that paper completely convincing. For example, Pirahã possessives can't be embedded: the equivalent of "John's brother's house" is ungrammatical and needs to be rendered as "John has a brother. The brother has a house." NPR argue that German has a similar restriction. This is true, sort of, in that "Hansens Auto" (Hans's car) is grammatical, but "*Hansens Autos Motor" ("Hans's car's motor") is not. However, this occurs because of a totally unrelated restriction: you can say something like "Hansens Vaters Frau" (Han's father's wife) because everyone involved is animate, and there's an alternate route involving "von" for embedding other kinds of possessives (as in "the motor of John's car"). Pirahã, as far as I know, does not have any possessive embedding at all, which does make it different from German. I'm also not sure that cherry-picking individual examples from many other languages successfully refutes Pirahã's exceptionalism. German may prohibit embedding in this circumstance and Hindi in that one, but surely the interesting part is that Pirahã seems to prohibit it everywhere. As an analogy, I know people who do not write with their left hands, and other folks who don't write with their right hands. However, this doesn't imply that hands aren't involved in writing at all. Realistically, this debate is going to be hard to settle without some more data. Unfortunately, Pirahã is said to be impossibly difficult to learn and there aren't a ton of native speakers wandering around universities. There is some data kicking around from another Australian language which may have similar properties, which might help.
dschiptsov 10y ago
While Chomsky's attempt to formalize a grammar is wonderful, the probabilistic approach (based on weights) to language advocated by Norvig is, it seems, more close to what is going on inside the brain. Brain does not perform recursive algebraic simplifications (which is, probably, the most beautiful abstraction humans have produced - fixed points, Y-Combinator, etc), it performs structure-based pattern matching - "it looks like a duck". Natural selection, it seems, would select a crudest, good-enough model, full of cues, short-cuts and heuristics learned from environment, instead of evolving a beautiful, universal recursive meta-circular evaluator, which MIT guys are worshiping (what else there is to worship, but a beauty?!) And, of course, mutually recursive processes (physical processes which could be abstracted out and formalized that way) are everywhere in biology. It just happen that language is a pattern matching, not an algebra, like everything else in the brain. Algebras, like numbers, does not exist outside our heads.)
- Retra 10y ago
  Algebra and pattern matching are basically the same thing, aren't they? To find a solution to an algebraic problem, you pattern match on the problem structure and see what falls out. To solve a pattern matching problem, you perform algebraic transformations to isolate the pattern being matched. >Algebras, like numbers, does not exist outside our heads Models are called models because they are not the things they model. Anything that is a model is an approximation. This doesn't mean they don't exist outside our heads. If that were true, there wouldn't be any computers.
  - visarga 10y ago
    > Algebra and pattern matching are basically the same thing The difference is that pattern matching is done on a model of the world provided by words, instead of applying it directly to senses. In reinforcement learning there is an approach to model the world first, then run RL on top of the model, because that would provide a way for the agent to imagine possible outcomes without the need to try them first in actuality. Model based RL is a refinement of direct RL and is essential for thinking.
miss_represent 10y ago
The article attempts to relate several hypothetical anecdotes, informally, but is otherwise scant on actual evidence. Here and there, are sprinkled vague nods towards unnamed "researchers" and "the new way" but not many specifics on who, when or how. Mostly it's just: Trust us, here's how it is now. The article uses only one name, and only aims to chip away at it. It has no new celebrities, no names stepping forward to take credit for the incredible breakthroughs that destroy the old and oh-so-inferior. The authors, and the editor are after something. But they offer nothing (or very little) in exchange, pre-supposing that it's just common sense which prevails over the tyrrany of something innately unlikable. Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers. It's such a dry, imprecise sociological subject after all. EDIT: they make a single mention, in passing, of research by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, but very briefly, and don't return to it afterward.
- chillacy 10y ago
  I hope this isn't the first time you're hearing that UG is on its way out.. articles like this pop up quite frequently.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Even a single citation to a paper would have gone a long way.... sigh... From my perspective Universal Grammar is not even the biggest contribution to language acquisition that Chomsky made: it's the notion that the mechanism for language acquisition is the same in children as it is in adults. What's weird about this is that I have always been under the impression that Chomsky's opinion was that language acquisition was not a lock step uncovering of universal grammar, but that universal grammar was simply the best way to represent language. Indeed, the work that has been done showing that Krashen's natural order hypothesis is correct (that people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented) give some credence to that notion. It doesn't necessarily follow that the brain actually holds a representation of universal grammar. I came away from this article being confused as to whether I need to re-read Chomsky's work, or whether the author needs to do so.
  - deleted 10y ago
raverbashing 10y ago
After reading the article, I still have to side with Chomsky on this one Universal grammar may not exist (exactly) as he described but "young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories, and to understand the relations among things" And what says this is not language related? It's an underlying structure that helps organize concepts. Who says thinking in shapes or concepts is not a language? Also, it's not because some languages have not evolved recursion that it's not a defying trait. In the same way western languages are not tonal but it doesn't mean a western kid wouldn't be able to learn them
- visarga 10y ago
  > ability to classify the world into categories ... what says this is not language related It is data related. The patterns exists in the data itself, young children are just uncovering the latent factors that explain the data. So, the ability of children is to learn from patterns.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > It is data related. The patterns exists in the data itself This is a cop out. You can't get semantics (and grammar) out of "types of words" only (or you couldn't have declensions) The important thing about recursion is not that it doesn't exist in some places, but the fact that it exists. The language capabilities of the brain seem to be an "hardware accelerated" heuristic that allows things to be connected more easily Given that cognitive psychologists can't even reproduce the experiments they're supposedly experts of, I'm not holding my breath from an explanation from them
- deleted 10y ago
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- mcguire 10y ago
  I think you've struck on something, sort-of. How's this Neo-Chomskian theory: The structure of the Universal Grammar and its related parameters is not encoded in the brains or genetic codes of humans, but in the very nature of the universe. The Universal Grammar is universal. If you wish to describe an action, any action, you need a subject, a verb, and an object. The verb must be transitive, and the subject and object must be both nouns but distinguishable from each other. In other cases where there is no part of reality that takes the place of an object, you can have an intransitive verb, but then you cannot have an objective noun. The parametrization of the language, such as in word order (SVO, VOS, etc.) occurs through the historical development of the language, by symmetry breaking and the requirement that language be a one-dimensional, temporal structure. The relationship between language and the human brain, or even the human mind, is largely accidental. The mind may or may not have a "recursion" module, or slots for "subjects" and "verbs", but whether it does or does not is immaterial. The Universal Grammar is the fundamental nature of reality, not the nature of the brain. Whether the brain has such structures or not depends entirely on how well the brain represents reality, and we already know that is imperfect. In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with god, and the WORD was god. Somebody notify Noam.
js8 10y ago
So, if there is no innate grammar, why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball", and in many languages (I can confirm only two)? If this is just a learned relationship between things, the order of the adjectives shouldn't matter. Furthermore, in Czech, words in sentence can be in many different orders (in particular, the ending word is the one that has emphasis), but order of adjectives still matters (or at least some feel right and some wrong). So we can learn and deal with different orderings of words.
- aantthony 10y ago
  "If this is just a learned relationship between things, the order of the adjectives shouldn't matter" Why not? Couldn't the order also be a learned relationship?
  - js8 10y ago
    It can be, but the same order comes up naturally in many languages. If it really doesn't matter and is just a learned convention, it could be different in different languages, just like ordering of "subject verb" is a convention (but I am not a language expert, I really only know Czech and English).
    - dalke 10y ago
      Both Czech and English are Indo-European. The stronger test would be to compare with more diverse languages. I do not know the answer. I did find from http://wals.info/chapter/87 http://wals.info/chapter/87 that in Ojibwa, "words expressing adjectival meaning are really verbs".
- FrozenVoid 10y ago
  > why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball", Because size is relative quantity(large as relative to what) while red is absolute descriptor(color=red).
  - FrozenVoid 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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pjlegato 10y ago
The article, and many professional functionalist lingusts, confuse Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory and its later "parameters" revision with the much more general hypothesis, also advocated by Chomsky, that human language grammar is somehow computable in a logical sense, formed through the application of objective and universal (with a small "u") logical rules. They prefer to view language rather as some sort of nebulous and inherently unquantifiable expression of the human spirit that is intrinsically bound to the unique cultural attributes of the society that produces it, a precious snowflake different from all others, which cannot be related to other languages through universal logical principles. They feel that the notion of universal (small U) principles of grammar somehow robs language of some essential human qualia by reducing it to a mere mechanism, and moreover many postmodernist linguists believe that the very idea of objectivity in language, to include supposed universal grammatical principles, is somehow part of a broader imperialistic plot by evil white heterosexual men to oppress and subjugate the glorious Other through malicious efforts of universal grammatical classification. (Yes, seriously. Your tax dollars support more than a few professors who believe this is true, in all seriousness, and teach it to impressionable young students every day.) These fears do not, however, have any bearing whatsoever on whether human language is, as a matter of fact, computable, the result of some set of universal logical principles. It either is or it isn't, and wishful thinking about how we would like to conceive of language has no bearing on whether that is true or not. That is not how scientific knowledge works. (Of course, many denounce the scientific method itself as merely another tool used by evil white straight men to oppress the Other, and this despite the fact that it was invented by Arabs.) The anti-computation camp frequently conflates Universal Grammar or parameters theory with the question of computability in general. When any evidence comes out that shows that a specific portion of UG is probably not true, they crow triumphantly about how language is really fundamentally something ineffable and pseudo-mystical, not able to be computed by logic. UG and the computability question are not the same thing. UG is a specific proposed model of language computation. It has largely been falsified, shown to be inconsistent with the empirical evidence of how actual languages work. That is fine. This does not imply anything at all about whether language is universally computable according to some model. It just tells us that language is not computable according to that model, not that it is not computable according to any model.
- 10y ago
x2398dh1 10y ago
I believe the chart shown in the article titled, "Noam-enclature And The New Linguistics," mischaracterizes Chomsky's theory, by conflating the commonly used meaning of the word, "grammar," with grammar as it was defined in Chomsky's paper. In essence, this chart is a straw man argument. https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A680FCC2-FE3E-4FA4-A1623C6B4EDB9A79_source.png https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A680FCC2... The top part of the chart shows, "the brain's innate sentence diagraming machine," and then points toward a sentence structure broken down into designators, adjectives, nouns and verbs, which is what the common definition of the word, "grammar," means. This is not what Chomsky's theory stated. Chomsky's theory defined grammar as (I'm paraphrasing) a system for understanding language, involving a syntactic component (e.g. there should be some kind of order), a semantic component (e.g. there should be some kind of meaning) and a phonological component (e.g. there should be some kinds of sounds). That's it! There was no inherent underlying English grammar structure hard-wired into babies' brains as the chart suggests. What is wired into a baby's brain, which assists with language, is the ability to order sensory inputs in a way that would result in language...that is what he called grammar. Basically what Chomsky did is, "psychologize," linguistics and I am not convinced by this article that this theory had been refuted. That would be like saying that Einstein refuted Newton.
- otabdeveloper1 10y ago
  > There was no inherent underlying English grammar structure hard-wired into babies' brains as the chart suggests. There was in Chomsky's original theory. His original claims have been significantly mellowed out after the mounting weight of counter-evidence crashed down.
  - methehack 10y ago
    No, there wasn't. That's the poster's point. Universal grammar in Chomsky is lower-level than any concrete language, English most definitely included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar The first two sentences should suffice.
glup 10y ago
My colleagues and I just got a paper accepted at Psych Science on this debate: we looked at the degree of generalization kids show in using determiners/articles ('a','an' or 'the') with nouns, also accounting for imitation of caregiver speech. If a child has heard "the cat" and "a cat", but only ever "the fish", when do they know they can generalize and say "a fish"? TLDR is that it's hard to say conclusively without larger samples of caregiver speech, but it seems like early speech (<2 yrs) has little evidence of category-based generalization, but it rapidly increases after that. Of course it's possible to contest that kids have more grammatical knowledge than what's reflected in what they say (the performance vs. competence distinction), but these methods can't address that. http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/meylan-inpress-psychsci.pdf http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/meylan-inpress-psychs... HN readers may appreciate the methodology: we construct a beta-binomial model as a simple approximation of the generative process, and measure how the parameters change over time when we fit to read data. The child's definite vs. indefinite uses for each noun are treated as flips of a weighted coin; the weighting is determined by the definite and indefinite uses by the parent combined with a beta prior. The peakedness of the beta prior indicates how similar a kid thinks nouns will be to one another (in the absence of evidence). We fit this model to all the successive samples of a bunch of longitudinal developmental datasets, including the Speechome project out of MIT. Nonzero, constant peakedness would be consistent with access to syntactic categories from birth; increasing peakedness of the scale parameter corresponds to growing syntactic generalization.
lovedj 10y ago
That quote is taken out of context. Actually, it is part of a few paragraphs which describe some of the history. Tomasello and his co-author then go on to add that these challenges led Chomsky to adapt his theory. Here’s a bit more context around that quote: “Fairly soon, however, linguistic comparisons among multiple languages began rolling in that did not fit with this neat schema. Some native Australian languages, such as Warlpiri, had grammatical elements scattered all over the sentence—noun and verb phrases that were not “neatly packaged” so that they could be plugged into Chomsky’s universal grammar—and some sentences had no verb phrase at all. These so-called outliers were difficult to reconcile with the universal grammar that was built on examples from European languages. Other exceptions to Chomsky’s theory came from the study of “ergative” languages, such as Basque or Urdu, in which the way a sentence subject is used is very different from that in many European languages, again challenging the idea of a universal grammar. These findings, along with theoretical linguistic work, led Chomsky and his followers to a wholesale revision of the notion of universal grammar during the 1980s. The new version of the theory, called principles and parameters, replaced a single universal grammar for all the world’s languages with a set of “universal” principles governing the structure of language. These principles manifested themselves differently in each language.”
pjdorrell 10y ago
My own theory of language acquisition and music: http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheStateOfMindInducedByMusic.html http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheState.... I don't assume any pre-existing "universal grammar". What I do assume is a pre-existing classification of sounds into language and non-language. This hypothesis is somewhat confirmed by the recent results as described at http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-5 http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-... (and see http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfComponentFive.html http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfCompone...).

149 points by doppp 10y ago

"I have not failed, I have just learned thousands of of ways which don't work" applies to science as well. It bothers me popular science often presents ground breaking work as a direct competitor to an established theory, while usually the established theory is a necessary stepping stone to the new one. usually, because it's more obvious approach and explains some aspects of the system. The old theory can be used as an instrument to gauge the qualities of the system under observation, and incompatibilities found provide then fertile material for new understanding.

cossatot 10y ago
Unfortunately, this is often the rhetorical approach commonly employed in unpopular, ahem, professional science as well. No one wants incremental progress, everything has to be transformative (science's disruptive). Fortunately, this has yet to pervade other industries we all know and love.

mturmon 10y ago

Anyone else feel that ending the first section with the well-known "science progresses one funeral at a time" quote is rather too sharply pointed, given Chomsky's age?

AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
He's earned it.
dilemma 10y ago
Yes, I felt it to be extremely poor taste.
mcguire 10y ago
Whether it is or not, I suspect you'd have to take the question up with Thomas Kuhn.

cma 10y ago

The article makes it sound like Chomsky's early approach was similar to the grammar you learn in school. That's actually what linguistic classification was like before Chomsky as I understand it. It's first mention of recursion is of a Chomsky paper from 2002, where everything is done with just a few rules, but recursion was also critical to Chomsky's earliest results. Coming away reading it I would think Chomsky had a really naive approach that had to be modified with Principles and Parameters just to handle Spanish first person verbs, because his program was so narrow they hadn't bothered to consider Spanish. Then it wasn't until 2002 that they started handling recursion. It doesn't quite say that directly, but that is just what I think someone might take away from reading the intro.

rflrob 10y ago

>In the second half of the 20th century, it was becoming ever clearer that our unique evolutionary history was responsible for many aspects of our unique human psychology In my experience, most "evolutionary psychology" stories are also ad hoc, unfalsifiable at best, and loaded with cultural biases from those who propose them. We don't have a good idea of what traits actually carry a selective advantage, and those advantages are often highly context dependent. The brain, culture, and evolution are both incredibly complex, and so you can often find some way to smush puzzle pieces together that almost works, but that doesn't mean that's what's actually happening.

raverbashing 10y ago
Correct A lot of traits and variances have no clear evolutionary advantage, most of the time it's fudging and trying to come up with an explanation for a certain behaviour There aren't good evolutionary explanations for a lot of physical traits, let alone for psychological ones

Ologn 10y ago

> when linguists actually went looking at the variation in languages across the world, they found counterexamples to the claim that this type of recursion was an essential property of language. Some languages—the Amazonian Pirahã, for instance—seem to get by without Chomskyan recursion. This is a pretty thin counter-example. A Christian missionary who became a linguist claimed that the Pirahã language had recursion. Then he later claimed that it did not have recursion. Linguists went down to study the Pirahã and found out that his first reports of Pirahã being recursive were correct, as they observed recursion in Pirahã language when they were there. The authors return to this language spoken by less than 400 people later on: > Chomsky defenders have responded that just because a language lacks a certain tool—recursion, for example—does not mean that it is not in the tool kit... makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in places they verge on the unfalsifiable. Recursion in languages has not been falsified - it has been found in all languages, including Pirahã.

andreasvc 10y ago
There is no consensus about this question. Both sides clearly have an ax to grind. Everett knows the language best, so I'd lend more credence to his judgment. Regardless of the answer, it only means that Chomsky's theory that everything is about recursion may or may not have been falsified, not that it is a good theory.
mattkrause 10y ago
I think you're giving Dan Everett (the person you're describing) a short shrift here. He says that his initial pro-recursion reports were attempting to fit Pirahã into the standard Chomskyian UG framework of the time. However, as he learned the language better, he started to realize that it didn't really fit and he was seeing the things he expected to see. For example, he initially described -sai as a nominializer (an "adapter" that lets other parts of speech be used in constructions that expect a noun). His later reports argue that it's actually not a nominalizer, but marks old information ("As you know Bob"). As far as I know, there is not actually a ton of non-Everett data on Pirahã. The most well-known paper that disagrees with Everett is probably Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (2009), which reanalyzes Everett's published work. They start with a list of properties are are supposedly unique to Pirahã, and claim that many of these show up in familiar languages. However, I don't find that paper completely convincing. For example, Pirahã possessives can't be embedded: the equivalent of "John's brother's house" is ungrammatical and needs to be rendered as "John has a brother. The brother has a house." NPR argue that German has a similar restriction. This is true, sort of, in that "Hansens Auto" (Hans's car) is grammatical, but "*Hansens Autos Motor" ("Hans's car's motor") is not. However, this occurs because of a totally unrelated restriction: you can say something like "Hansens Vaters Frau" (Han's father's wife) because everyone involved is animate, and there's an alternate route involving "von" for embedding other kinds of possessives (as in "the motor of John's car"). Pirahã, as far as I know, does not have any possessive embedding at all, which does make it different from German. I'm also not sure that cherry-picking individual examples from many other languages successfully refutes Pirahã's exceptionalism. German may prohibit embedding in this circumstance and Hindi in that one, but surely the interesting part is that Pirahã seems to prohibit it everywhere. As an analogy, I know people who do not write with their left hands, and other folks who don't write with their right hands. However, this doesn't imply that hands aren't involved in writing at all. Realistically, this debate is going to be hard to settle without some more data. Unfortunately, Pirahã is said to be impossibly difficult to learn and there aren't a ton of native speakers wandering around universities. There is some data kicking around from another Australian language which may have similar properties, which might help.

dschiptsov 10y ago

While Chomsky's attempt to formalize a grammar is wonderful, the probabilistic approach (based on weights) to language advocated by Norvig is, it seems, more close to what is going on inside the brain. Brain does not perform recursive algebraic simplifications (which is, probably, the most beautiful abstraction humans have produced - fixed points, Y-Combinator, etc), it performs structure-based pattern matching - "it looks like a duck". Natural selection, it seems, would select a crudest, good-enough model, full of cues, short-cuts and heuristics learned from environment, instead of evolving a beautiful, universal recursive meta-circular evaluator, which MIT guys are worshiping (what else there is to worship, but a beauty?!) And, of course, mutually recursive processes (physical processes which could be abstracted out and formalized that way) are everywhere in biology. It just happen that language is a pattern matching, not an algebra, like everything else in the brain. Algebras, like numbers, does not exist outside our heads.)

Retra 10y ago
Algebra and pattern matching are basically the same thing, aren't they? To find a solution to an algebraic problem, you pattern match on the problem structure and see what falls out. To solve a pattern matching problem, you perform algebraic transformations to isolate the pattern being matched. >Algebras, like numbers, does not exist outside our heads Models are called models because they are not the things they model. Anything that is a model is an approximation. This doesn't mean they don't exist outside our heads. If that were true, there wouldn't be any computers.
- visarga 10y ago
  > Algebra and pattern matching are basically the same thing The difference is that pattern matching is done on a model of the world provided by words, instead of applying it directly to senses. In reinforcement learning there is an approach to model the world first, then run RL on top of the model, because that would provide a way for the agent to imagine possible outcomes without the need to try them first in actuality. Model based RL is a refinement of direct RL and is essential for thinking.

miss_represent 10y ago

The article attempts to relate several hypothetical anecdotes, informally, but is otherwise scant on actual evidence. Here and there, are sprinkled vague nods towards unnamed "researchers" and "the new way" but not many specifics on who, when or how. Mostly it's just: Trust us, here's how it is now. The article uses only one name, and only aims to chip away at it. It has no new celebrities, no names stepping forward to take credit for the incredible breakthroughs that destroy the old and oh-so-inferior. The authors, and the editor are after something. But they offer nothing (or very little) in exchange, pre-supposing that it's just common sense which prevails over the tyrrany of something innately unlikable. Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers. It's such a dry, imprecise sociological subject after all. EDIT: they make a single mention, in passing, of research by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, but very briefly, and don't return to it afterward.

chillacy 10y ago
I hope this isn't the first time you're hearing that UG is on its way out.. articles like this pop up quite frequently.
mikekchar 10y ago
Even a single citation to a paper would have gone a long way.... sigh... From my perspective Universal Grammar is not even the biggest contribution to language acquisition that Chomsky made: it's the notion that the mechanism for language acquisition is the same in children as it is in adults. What's weird about this is that I have always been under the impression that Chomsky's opinion was that language acquisition was not a lock step uncovering of universal grammar, but that universal grammar was simply the best way to represent language. Indeed, the work that has been done showing that Krashen's natural order hypothesis is correct (that people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented) give some credence to that notion. It doesn't necessarily follow that the brain actually holds a representation of universal grammar. I came away from this article being confused as to whether I need to re-read Chomsky's work, or whether the author needs to do so.
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raverbashing 10y ago

After reading the article, I still have to side with Chomsky on this one Universal grammar may not exist (exactly) as he described but "young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories, and to understand the relations among things" And what says this is not language related? It's an underlying structure that helps organize concepts. Who says thinking in shapes or concepts is not a language? Also, it's not because some languages have not evolved recursion that it's not a defying trait. In the same way western languages are not tonal but it doesn't mean a western kid wouldn't be able to learn them

visarga 10y ago
> ability to classify the world into categories ... what says this is not language related It is data related. The patterns exists in the data itself, young children are just uncovering the latent factors that explain the data. So, the ability of children is to learn from patterns.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  > It is data related. The patterns exists in the data itself This is a cop out. You can't get semantics (and grammar) out of "types of words" only (or you couldn't have declensions) The important thing about recursion is not that it doesn't exist in some places, but the fact that it exists. The language capabilities of the brain seem to be an "hardware accelerated" heuristic that allows things to be connected more easily Given that cognitive psychologists can't even reproduce the experiments they're supposedly experts of, I'm not holding my breath from an explanation from them
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mcguire 10y ago
I think you've struck on something, sort-of. How's this Neo-Chomskian theory: The structure of the Universal Grammar and its related parameters is not encoded in the brains or genetic codes of humans, but in the very nature of the universe. The Universal Grammar is universal. If you wish to describe an action, any action, you need a subject, a verb, and an object. The verb must be transitive, and the subject and object must be both nouns but distinguishable from each other. In other cases where there is no part of reality that takes the place of an object, you can have an intransitive verb, but then you cannot have an objective noun. The parametrization of the language, such as in word order (SVO, VOS, etc.) occurs through the historical development of the language, by symmetry breaking and the requirement that language be a one-dimensional, temporal structure. The relationship between language and the human brain, or even the human mind, is largely accidental. The mind may or may not have a "recursion" module, or slots for "subjects" and "verbs", but whether it does or does not is immaterial. The Universal Grammar is the fundamental nature of reality, not the nature of the brain. Whether the brain has such structures or not depends entirely on how well the brain represents reality, and we already know that is imperfect. In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with god, and the WORD was god. Somebody notify Noam.

js8 10y ago

So, if there is no innate grammar, why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball", and in many languages (I can confirm only two)? If this is just a learned relationship between things, the order of the adjectives shouldn't matter. Furthermore, in Czech, words in sentence can be in many different orders (in particular, the ending word is the one that has emphasis), but order of adjectives still matters (or at least some feel right and some wrong). So we can learn and deal with different orderings of words.

aantthony 10y ago
"If this is just a learned relationship between things, the order of the adjectives shouldn't matter" Why not? Couldn't the order also be a learned relationship?
- js8 10y ago
  It can be, but the same order comes up naturally in many languages. If it really doesn't matter and is just a learned convention, it could be different in different languages, just like ordering of "subject verb" is a convention (but I am not a language expert, I really only know Czech and English).
  - dalke 10y ago
    Both Czech and English are Indo-European. The stronger test would be to compare with more diverse languages. I do not know the answer. I did find from http://wals.info/chapter/87 http://wals.info/chapter/87 that in Ojibwa, "words expressing adjectival meaning are really verbs".
FrozenVoid 10y ago
> why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball", Because size is relative quantity(large as relative to what) while red is absolute descriptor(color=red).
- FrozenVoid 10y ago

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pjlegato 10y ago

The article, and many professional functionalist lingusts, confuse Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory and its later "parameters" revision with the much more general hypothesis, also advocated by Chomsky, that human language grammar is somehow computable in a logical sense, formed through the application of objective and universal (with a small "u") logical rules. They prefer to view language rather as some sort of nebulous and inherently unquantifiable expression of the human spirit that is intrinsically bound to the unique cultural attributes of the society that produces it, a precious snowflake different from all others, which cannot be related to other languages through universal logical principles. They feel that the notion of universal (small U) principles of grammar somehow robs language of some essential human qualia by reducing it to a mere mechanism, and moreover many postmodernist linguists believe that the very idea of objectivity in language, to include supposed universal grammatical principles, is somehow part of a broader imperialistic plot by evil white heterosexual men to oppress and subjugate the glorious Other through malicious efforts of universal grammatical classification. (Yes, seriously. Your tax dollars support more than a few professors who believe this is true, in all seriousness, and teach it to impressionable young students every day.) These fears do not, however, have any bearing whatsoever on whether human language is, as a matter of fact, computable, the result of some set of universal logical principles. It either is or it isn't, and wishful thinking about how we would like to conceive of language has no bearing on whether that is true or not. That is not how scientific knowledge works. (Of course, many denounce the scientific method itself as merely another tool used by evil white straight men to oppress the Other, and this despite the fact that it was invented by Arabs.) The anti-computation camp frequently conflates Universal Grammar or parameters theory with the question of computability in general. When any evidence comes out that shows that a specific portion of UG is probably not true, they crow triumphantly about how language is really fundamentally something ineffable and pseudo-mystical, not able to be computed by logic. UG and the computability question are not the same thing. UG is a specific proposed model of language computation. It has largely been falsified, shown to be inconsistent with the empirical evidence of how actual languages work. That is fine. This does not imply anything at all about whether language is universally computable according to some model. It just tells us that language is not computable according to that model, not that it is not computable according to any model.

10y ago

x2398dh1 10y ago

I believe the chart shown in the article titled, "Noam-enclature And The New Linguistics," mischaracterizes Chomsky's theory, by conflating the commonly used meaning of the word, "grammar," with grammar as it was defined in Chomsky's paper. In essence, this chart is a straw man argument. https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A680FCC2-FE3E-4FA4-A1623C6B4EDB9A79_source.png https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A680FCC2... The top part of the chart shows, "the brain's innate sentence diagraming machine," and then points toward a sentence structure broken down into designators, adjectives, nouns and verbs, which is what the common definition of the word, "grammar," means. This is not what Chomsky's theory stated. Chomsky's theory defined grammar as (I'm paraphrasing) a system for understanding language, involving a syntactic component (e.g. there should be some kind of order), a semantic component (e.g. there should be some kind of meaning) and a phonological component (e.g. there should be some kinds of sounds). That's it! There was no inherent underlying English grammar structure hard-wired into babies' brains as the chart suggests. What is wired into a baby's brain, which assists with language, is the ability to order sensory inputs in a way that would result in language...that is what he called grammar. Basically what Chomsky did is, "psychologize," linguistics and I am not convinced by this article that this theory had been refuted. That would be like saying that Einstein refuted Newton.

otabdeveloper1 10y ago
> There was no inherent underlying English grammar structure hard-wired into babies' brains as the chart suggests. There was in Chomsky's original theory. His original claims have been significantly mellowed out after the mounting weight of counter-evidence crashed down.
- methehack 10y ago
  No, there wasn't. That's the poster's point. Universal grammar in Chomsky is lower-level than any concrete language, English most definitely included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar The first two sentences should suffice.

glup 10y ago

My colleagues and I just got a paper accepted at Psych Science on this debate: we looked at the degree of generalization kids show in using determiners/articles ('a','an' or 'the') with nouns, also accounting for imitation of caregiver speech. If a child has heard "the cat" and "a cat", but only ever "the fish", when do they know they can generalize and say "a fish"? TLDR is that it's hard to say conclusively without larger samples of caregiver speech, but it seems like early speech (<2 yrs) has little evidence of category-based generalization, but it rapidly increases after that. Of course it's possible to contest that kids have more grammatical knowledge than what's reflected in what they say (the performance vs. competence distinction), but these methods can't address that. http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/meylan-inpress-psychsci.pdf http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/meylan-inpress-psychs... HN readers may appreciate the methodology: we construct a beta-binomial model as a simple approximation of the generative process, and measure how the parameters change over time when we fit to read data. The child's definite vs. indefinite uses for each noun are treated as flips of a weighted coin; the weighting is determined by the definite and indefinite uses by the parent combined with a beta prior. The peakedness of the beta prior indicates how similar a kid thinks nouns will be to one another (in the absence of evidence). We fit this model to all the successive samples of a bunch of longitudinal developmental datasets, including the Speechome project out of MIT. Nonzero, constant peakedness would be consistent with access to syntactic categories from birth; increasing peakedness of the scale parameter corresponds to growing syntactic generalization.

lovedj 10y ago

That quote is taken out of context. Actually, it is part of a few paragraphs which describe some of the history. Tomasello and his co-author then go on to add that these challenges led Chomsky to adapt his theory. Here’s a bit more context around that quote: “Fairly soon, however, linguistic comparisons among multiple languages began rolling in that did not fit with this neat schema. Some native Australian languages, such as Warlpiri, had grammatical elements scattered all over the sentence—noun and verb phrases that were not “neatly packaged” so that they could be plugged into Chomsky’s universal grammar—and some sentences had no verb phrase at all. These so-called outliers were difficult to reconcile with the universal grammar that was built on examples from European languages. Other exceptions to Chomsky’s theory came from the study of “ergative” languages, such as Basque or Urdu, in which the way a sentence subject is used is very different from that in many European languages, again challenging the idea of a universal grammar. These findings, along with theoretical linguistic work, led Chomsky and his followers to a wholesale revision of the notion of universal grammar during the 1980s. The new version of the theory, called principles and parameters, replaced a single universal grammar for all the world’s languages with a set of “universal” principles governing the structure of language. These principles manifested themselves differently in each language.”

pjdorrell 10y ago

My own theory of language acquisition and music: http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheStateOfMindInducedByMusic.html http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheState.... I don't assume any pre-existing "universal grammar". What I do assume is a pre-existing classification of sounds into language and non-language. This hypothesis is somewhat confirmed by the recent results as described at http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-5 http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-... (and see http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfComponentFive.html http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfCompone...).