The article actually doesn't say that LLMs are causing us to rethink human language acquisition. It says that LLMs are causing us to rethink whether Chomsky's u

The article actually doesn't say that LLMs are causing us to rethink human language acquisition. It says that LLMs are causing us to rethink whether Chomsky's universal grammar is a good candidate for a necessary substrate for language acquisition. For example, it says: > Universal grammar enthusiasts have long argued that no other biological species can have language that has grammar and recursive composability, because they don’t have universal grammar. That seems like a reasonable characterization of the universal grammar viewpoint as I understand it, and the existence of models which have acquired impressive language skills without a universal grammar substrate - by using instead a vast quantity of input data - certainly calls that view into legitimate question. It may be that Chomsky believes that he never said the universal grammar was the ONLY way to acquire language, but a lot of computational linguistics research in the Chomsky school certainly took that as an assumption. An assumption that the success of statistical modeling with no universal recursive grammar substrate certainly calls into question.