7 ms·

Toddlers’ grammar skills not inherent, but learned, new Stanford research says

48 points by stared 10y ago

stared 10y ago
See also: On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
- lngnmn 10y ago
  This basically postulates that language learned is a process similar to a supervised machine learning algorithms, and this, perhaps, is a more realistic view that Chomsky has. The machinery has been evolved, but "the training data" is required to make it work.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Be careful of the trap: for quite a while now, each generation has simply treated it as "realistic" to match the brain's workings to that generation's popular new computational technique.
- neutralid 10y ago
  What's interesting is that Google's Translate, via neural network training, seems to have found an efficient structure underlying many languages: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translate-ai-invents-its-own-language-to-translate-with/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translat...
dpark 10y ago
How is this not obvious? Who could claim that grammatical understanding is innate given that grammar is tied to the language and the language itself is learned? Studying how grammar is learned certainly seems like a valuable endeavor but I don't understand the "debate" over whether it's innate or learned.
- maldusiecle 10y ago
  To simplify, the Chomskyan position is that there are certain shared characteristics of all human languages' grammars, and that these characteristics reflect structures in the human brain.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Fair enough. The article explained that poorly and made it sound as if there is a real contingent of psychologists who think that babies magically know grammar as opposed to learning it. Given this reframing of the research, I fail to see how this study demonstrates anything, though. If the brain has special structures that allow humans to learn grammar, you would still expect to see the same pattern of "terrible, broken grammar -> mediocre grammar -> good grammar" that we see. We see the same learning pattern for things that the brain does have special structures for, such as... well... everything from sight to motor control.
- dmreedy 10y ago
  Like most ticklish philosophical problems, I think it becomes less obvious the deeper in to the problem you look. There are a number of considerations at play here, and a long history of violently disagreeing about them. Is language tied to grammar? Or is grammar tied to language[1]? There has been a lot of work seeking to examine the common underpinnings of languages that seem otherwise disparate, and a somewhat flexible core grammatical structure has been proposed as one of these unifying components. The speculative step some take next (including people like Chomsky) is that the reason that all of these common patterns appear is that the brain has evolved some specific hardware that serves as the basis for a set of communication protocols that we call natural languages, and all natural languages instantiate this basic hardware in different ways[2]. If you think this kind of hardwiring is possible, then another obvious-but-not-obvious question follows. Can language really be learned[3]? Can you take a clean slate of neurons (some arbitrary configuration of connections) and, given enough input data, end up with a system that understands language (to frame it as a machine learning problem, which it may or may not be)? Or is it closer to a game of connect-the-dots; the bare framework is there, built into the way the brain arranges itself over the course of millions of years. Input data is just required to figure out exactly what the final arrangement of the picture is, whether it looks like English or Russian or Mandarin. The current mood in cognitive neuroscience academic circles seems to be the former case, that you can 'simply' throw enough data at a general-purpose learning model and get a language-speaker out. Partly due to the success to deep learning approaches in what were previously very difficult problems in NLP. But I don't think it's fair to say there's nothing worthy of debate here. --- [1] Or is this a false dichotomy and there's some even weirder relationship between the two. [2] For a primitive example, languages with SVO ordering vs. SOV ordering. Different instantiations of the same triple with subjects, objects, and verbs. Ray Jackendoff took this another step with formulations like XBar grammar, which was trying to demonstrate how a universal, parameterized grammar might look. [3] Grice had a fun theory that the observable signal of language is _so_ noisy that it's impossible to learn outright, regardless of the number of examples you're exposed to. And thus, everyone speaks a slightly different language, and some sets of these idiolects are, roughly, mutually compatible. I don't think he ever did any math to demonstrate this though.
nyrulez 10y ago
I am surprised this required research. How is this not obvious ? What's next ? Algebra skills and essay writing? You could pretty much do this research for every thing we ever learn from school to college and publish endless amount of papers.
- tn13 10y ago
  No this is not obvious. Throughout human history and even today algebra, writing and reading are hard skills for humans which require years of training to master. Ability to speak however comes very naturally without special training. Human societies independently developed isomorphic grammar. For example Navajo Indians helped American soldiers translate their messages into Navajo and back so Germans wont understand it. This sort of evidence lead scholars like Chomsky to believe that human brain might have some in-built ability aided by evolution to parse some basic grammatical rules.
  - dpark 10y ago
    > Ability to speak however comes very naturally without special training. It literally takes years of practice for children to speak well. Maybe it's natural but we tend to dismiss the difficulty because it happens early. I would think if we had dedicated hardware for grammar subsequent languages wouldn't be so difficult to learn either. It's easier to learn algebra than a second language.
    - Xophmeister 10y ago
      It is believed that second language acquisition is "harder" than first language for a number of reasons, such as the placidity of the brain crystallising as we age and, potentially, that any special hardware we may have has a finite capacity (because physics). People research this (my wife is doing her PhD on it currently) and the evidence is neither obvious nor conclusive.
    - dilemma 10y ago
      Children learn language without instruction. That is all. Clearly, there is innate linguistic capability in humans.
lngnmn 10y ago
It is learned because the brain has specialized circuitry to be able to learn it. The machinery obviously has been evolved and is inherited, while a grammar of a particular language has been learned. There is also a strong hypothesis that the structure of the specialized areas of the brain "reflects" the general notions of the shared environment, such as things, attributes, processes which corresponds to nouns, adjectives and verbs. Like visual cortex has its own hard-wired heuristics and presuppositions (that use environmental cues such as shadows, distances, illumination) which are used in the process of scene decomposition and interpretation, the language area should have its own hard-wired heuristics, which, presumably, are used in grammar learning. The knowledge (heuristics) are encoded in the structure, not in some kind of information.
- jjtheblunt 10y ago
  Why "obviously" ?
  - lngnmn 10y ago
    It is obvious after taking a decent psychology course, like the one of Paul Bloom at Yale.
- _dps 10y ago
  > The knowledge (heuristics) are encoded in the structure, not in some kind of information. When you're talking about neural computation, distinguishing between an evolved network structure/architecture and "information" (or at least biases toward certain kind of information) is not very useful. The nature of these systems as computing substrates is that they encode information in network structure and rules for updating that structure.
  - lngnmn 10y ago
    > they encode information in network structure and rules for updating that structure I think use of the term 'information' is not accurate. There are no bits and the whole information theory, it seems, is synthetic and has nothing to do with how the brain actually works. It is not a digital machine but electro-mechanical, if you wish.
skyisblue 10y ago
It is said that babys who are spoken to in multiple languages speak later than those who are spoken to in just one language. Could this extra 'learning' cause the delay in speech?
multinglets 10y ago
How long is the one side of this thing going to talk past the other?

48 points by stared 10y ago

See also: On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

lngnmn 10y ago
This basically postulates that language learned is a process similar to a supervised machine learning algorithms, and this, perhaps, is a more realistic view that Chomsky has. The machinery has been evolved, but "the training data" is required to make it work.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Be careful of the trap: for quite a while now, each generation has simply treated it as "realistic" to match the brain's workings to that generation's popular new computational technique.
neutralid 10y ago
What's interesting is that Google's Translate, via neural network training, seems to have found an efficient structure underlying many languages: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translate-ai-invents-its-own-language-to-translate-with/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translat...

dpark 10y ago

How is this not obvious? Who could claim that grammatical understanding is innate given that grammar is tied to the language and the language itself is learned? Studying how grammar is learned certainly seems like a valuable endeavor but I don't understand the "debate" over whether it's innate or learned.

maldusiecle 10y ago
To simplify, the Chomskyan position is that there are certain shared characteristics of all human languages' grammars, and that these characteristics reflect structures in the human brain.
- dpark 10y ago
  Fair enough. The article explained that poorly and made it sound as if there is a real contingent of psychologists who think that babies magically know grammar as opposed to learning it. Given this reframing of the research, I fail to see how this study demonstrates anything, though. If the brain has special structures that allow humans to learn grammar, you would still expect to see the same pattern of "terrible, broken grammar -> mediocre grammar -> good grammar" that we see. We see the same learning pattern for things that the brain does have special structures for, such as... well... everything from sight to motor control.
dmreedy 10y ago
Like most ticklish philosophical problems, I think it becomes less obvious the deeper in to the problem you look. There are a number of considerations at play here, and a long history of violently disagreeing about them. Is language tied to grammar? Or is grammar tied to language[1]? There has been a lot of work seeking to examine the common underpinnings of languages that seem otherwise disparate, and a somewhat flexible core grammatical structure has been proposed as one of these unifying components. The speculative step some take next (including people like Chomsky) is that the reason that all of these common patterns appear is that the brain has evolved some specific hardware that serves as the basis for a set of communication protocols that we call natural languages, and all natural languages instantiate this basic hardware in different ways[2]. If you think this kind of hardwiring is possible, then another obvious-but-not-obvious question follows. Can language really be learned[3]? Can you take a clean slate of neurons (some arbitrary configuration of connections) and, given enough input data, end up with a system that understands language (to frame it as a machine learning problem, which it may or may not be)? Or is it closer to a game of connect-the-dots; the bare framework is there, built into the way the brain arranges itself over the course of millions of years. Input data is just required to figure out exactly what the final arrangement of the picture is, whether it looks like English or Russian or Mandarin. The current mood in cognitive neuroscience academic circles seems to be the former case, that you can 'simply' throw enough data at a general-purpose learning model and get a language-speaker out. Partly due to the success to deep learning approaches in what were previously very difficult problems in NLP. But I don't think it's fair to say there's nothing worthy of debate here. --- [1] Or is this a false dichotomy and there's some even weirder relationship between the two. [2] For a primitive example, languages with SVO ordering vs. SOV ordering. Different instantiations of the same triple with subjects, objects, and verbs. Ray Jackendoff took this another step with formulations like XBar grammar, which was trying to demonstrate how a universal, parameterized grammar might look. [3] Grice had a fun theory that the observable signal of language is _so_ noisy that it's impossible to learn outright, regardless of the number of examples you're exposed to. And thus, everyone speaks a slightly different language, and some sets of these idiolects are, roughly, mutually compatible. I don't think he ever did any math to demonstrate this though.

nyrulez 10y ago

I am surprised this required research. How is this not obvious ? What's next ? Algebra skills and essay writing? You could pretty much do this research for every thing we ever learn from school to college and publish endless amount of papers.

tn13 10y ago
No this is not obvious. Throughout human history and even today algebra, writing and reading are hard skills for humans which require years of training to master. Ability to speak however comes very naturally without special training. Human societies independently developed isomorphic grammar. For example Navajo Indians helped American soldiers translate their messages into Navajo and back so Germans wont understand it. This sort of evidence lead scholars like Chomsky to believe that human brain might have some in-built ability aided by evolution to parse some basic grammatical rules.
- dpark 10y ago
  > Ability to speak however comes very naturally without special training. It literally takes years of practice for children to speak well. Maybe it's natural but we tend to dismiss the difficulty because it happens early. I would think if we had dedicated hardware for grammar subsequent languages wouldn't be so difficult to learn either. It's easier to learn algebra than a second language.
  - Xophmeister 10y ago
    It is believed that second language acquisition is "harder" than first language for a number of reasons, such as the placidity of the brain crystallising as we age and, potentially, that any special hardware we may have has a finite capacity (because physics). People research this (my wife is doing her PhD on it currently) and the evidence is neither obvious nor conclusive.
  - dilemma 10y ago
    Children learn language without instruction. That is all. Clearly, there is innate linguistic capability in humans.

lngnmn 10y ago

It is learned because the brain has specialized circuitry to be able to learn it. The machinery obviously has been evolved and is inherited, while a grammar of a particular language has been learned. There is also a strong hypothesis that the structure of the specialized areas of the brain "reflects" the general notions of the shared environment, such as things, attributes, processes which corresponds to nouns, adjectives and verbs. Like visual cortex has its own hard-wired heuristics and presuppositions (that use environmental cues such as shadows, distances, illumination) which are used in the process of scene decomposition and interpretation, the language area should have its own hard-wired heuristics, which, presumably, are used in grammar learning. The knowledge (heuristics) are encoded in the structure, not in some kind of information.

jjtheblunt 10y ago
Why "obviously" ?
- lngnmn 10y ago
  It is obvious after taking a decent psychology course, like the one of Paul Bloom at Yale.
_dps 10y ago
> The knowledge (heuristics) are encoded in the structure, not in some kind of information. When you're talking about neural computation, distinguishing between an evolved network structure/architecture and "information" (or at least biases toward certain kind of information) is not very useful. The nature of these systems as computing substrates is that they encode information in network structure and rules for updating that structure.
- lngnmn 10y ago
  > they encode information in network structure and rules for updating that structure I think use of the term 'information' is not accurate. There are no bits and the whole information theory, it seems, is synthetic and has nothing to do with how the brain actually works. It is not a digital machine but electro-mechanical, if you wish.

skyisblue 10y ago

It is said that babys who are spoken to in multiple languages speak later than those who are spoken to in just one language. Could this extra 'learning' cause the delay in speech?

multinglets 10y ago

How long is the one side of this thing going to talk past the other?