4 ms·
From my very limited knowledge of language acquisition, my guess is you might be wrong (although I'm happy to be corrected). Don't human children acquire langua
by bigfudge 16y ago
From my very limited knowledge of language acquisition, my guess is you might be wrong (although I'm happy to be corrected). Don't human children acquire language much faster, more accurately and from poorer signals than would be possible via statistical inference?
- anigbrowl 16y agoI could be - I'm no expert on this either. My understanding of academic linguistics is that there are two main schools of thought: on one side you have Noam Chomsky as the most famous exponent, saying that all languages have a sort of universal grammar that somehow reflects our brain structure, and on the other the behaviorism of BF Skinner, that languages are largely arbitrary, syntactic processing is learned behavior, and complexity is both a result of and a selector for intelligence as an evolutionary trait. I don't have a really strong opinion, though I lean a bit towards the behaviorist approach. There have been some suggestions from ethnomusicologists that small children everywhere sing the same sort of melody on the same scale, which inclined me to the opposite view for a while, but I think that was more of a theory than a finding and still needs evidence.