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You've given me some things to think about. I see how your experiment would disprove Poverty of Stimulus (if we could roughly assume how much input a baby gets)
by yyyk 3y ago
You've given me some things to think about. I see how your experiment would disprove Poverty of Stimulus (if we could roughly assume how much input a baby gets) but I don't see how it would disprove Universal Grammar. If the computer could learn a non-human language, wouldn't that lead to the charge that while our computer is a competent language learner, its methods are fundamentally unlike those of a human?
- tsimionescu 3y agoAs far as I understand, the argument is: it's impossible to learn human language from such poor stimulus without some kind of genetically determined universal grammar. If we prove that it is actually possible (even with non-human methods) to learn human language with such poor stimulus while not possessing a built-in universal grammar, that makes universal grammar unnecessary, or even contingent. So, IF such a machine could be built, it would open the possibility that universal grammar, even if it exists, is only an accident of history (just as much as Indo-European influence on most European languages), not one of human genetics.