3 ms·
It may be true that the brain can route around damage to be able to produce language using different brain structures than are typically used for that purpose,
by jsenn 4y ago
It may be true that the brain can route around damage to be able to produce language using different brain structures than are typically used for that purpose, but what will never happen (as far as I know) is that the brain will spontaneously learn to produce something other than language instead. An example I gave in a sibling thread is a baby raised next to a forest full of birds: the baby will effortlessly learn its parents' native language, but no amount of listening to the birds will cause the baby to produce birdsong instead. GPT-3 would happily produce birdsong the same way it happily produces sequences of chess moves and other stuff in its training data, which means it's doing something different from the human brain.
- webmaven 4y agoI think you may be confusing the hardwiring effects of a particular embodiment (birds have a syrinx, humans have a larynx) with a neural predisposition to particular patterns of vocalization. In any case, you're wrong on the underlying facts as well: various "raised by wolves" cases generally report highly skilled animal mimicry, including birdsong, but a marked difficulty in acquiring human language.
- jsenn 4y agoNo, there really is a neural predisposition to language--not particular sounds, but language. I looked at the Wikipedia page on feral children. Many in fact do learn language when they're rescued. The ones that don't may bark like a dog, but that's not something that requires a language faculty! That said, there is as you say an example of a boy raised in a room with birds and neglected (not exposed to human language) who did in fact chirp and flap his arms like wings! This isn't relevant to the point I was making above though. If the language faculty were not hard-wired, then normal children would be just as likely to display these behaviours as to speak their parents' native language. As far as I know that happens in not 1 percent or 1 tenth of a percent, but in 0 percent of cases. To me, this indicates a hard-wired tendency, rather than a perfectly general system with some optimizations or soft predispositions.