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>Children don't get 'rich feedback' at all on the grammatical structure of their sentences. They probably do get parents and the like correcting them or giving

by tim333 1y ago

>Children don't get 'rich feedback' at all on the grammatical structure of their sentences. They probably do get parents and the like correcting them or giving an example. Kid says we goed fish, adult say yeah we went fishing. I taught English as a foreign language a bit and people learn almost entirely from examples like that rather than talking about ellipsis or any sort of grammar jargon. It seems brains / neurons / LLMs are good at pattern recognition. Brains probably quicker on the uptake than LLM backpropagation though.

foldr 1y ago
That particular example is irrelevant to poverty of the stimulus arguments because no-one has ever suggested that kids acquiring English lack evidence for the irregular past tense of ‘go’. See above for some examples of the kinds of grammatical principles that can form the basis of a poverty of the stimulus argument. They’re not generally the kind of thing that parental corrections could conceivably help with, for two reasons: 1) (The main reason) Poverty of the stimulus arguments relate to features of grammatical constructions that are rarely exemplified. As examples are rarely uttered, deviant instances are rarely corrected, even assuming the presence of superlatively wise and attentive caregivers. 2) (The reason that you mention) Explicit instruction on grammatical rules has almost no effect on most people, especially young children. So corrections at most add a few more examples of bad sentences to the child’s dataset, which they can probably obtain anyway via more indirect cues. If corrections were really effective, someone should be able to do a killer experiment where they show an improved (i.e. more adult-like) handling of, say, quantifier scope in four year olds after giving them lots of relevant corrections. I am open minded about the outcome of such an experiment, but I’d bet a fairly large amount of money that it would go nowhere.

by tim333 1y ago

foldr 1y ago

That particular example is irrelevant to poverty of the stimulus arguments because no-one has ever suggested that kids acquiring English lack evidence for the irregular past tense of ‘go’. See above for some examples of the kinds of grammatical principles that can form the basis of a poverty of the stimulus argument. They’re not generally the kind of thing that parental corrections could conceivably help with, for two reasons: 1) (The main reason) Poverty of the stimulus arguments relate to features of grammatical constructions that are rarely exemplified. As examples are rarely uttered, deviant instances are rarely corrected, even assuming the presence of superlatively wise and attentive caregivers. 2) (The reason that you mention) Explicit instruction on grammatical rules has almost no effect on most people, especially young children. So corrections at most add a few more examples of bad sentences to the child’s dataset, which they can probably obtain anyway via more indirect cues. If corrections were really effective, someone should be able to do a killer experiment where they show an improved (i.e. more adult-like) handling of, say, quantifier scope in four year olds after giving them lots of relevant corrections. I am open minded about the outcome of such an experiment, but I’d bet a fairly large amount of money that it would go nowhere.