
Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - doppp
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/
======
miss_represent
The article attempts to relate several hypothetical anecdotes, informally, but
is otherwise scant on actual evidence.

Here and there, are sprinkled vague nods towards unnamed " _researchers_ " and
" _the new way_ " but not many specifics on who, when or how. Mostly it's
just: Trust us, here's how it is now.

The article uses only one name, and only aims to chip away at it. It has no
new celebrities, no names stepping forward to take credit for the incredible
breakthroughs that destroy the old and oh-so-inferior.

The authors, and the editor are after something. But they offer nothing (or
very little) in exchange, pre-supposing that it's just common sense which
prevails over the tyrrany of something innately unlikable.

Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers. It's such a dry,
imprecise sociological subject after all.

 _EDIT:_ they make a single mention, in passing, of research by Harvard
psychologist Steven Pinker, but very briefly, and don't return to it
afterward.

~~~
praptak
> Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers.

My hypothesis is that it's Chomsky personally who ruffles people's feathers.
And this is not because his work on linguistics but rather his political
views.

~~~
mattkrause
I really doubt it's his politics. George Layoff and Chomsky had (have?) a
protracted, acrimonious battle over the relationship between syntax and
semantics, but they're not miles apart, politically.

I find Chomsky frustrating because he comes up with these incredibly elegant
theoretical machinery--and then is totally disinterested in empirically
testing then.

For example, the "Language Acquisition Device" absolutely _HAS_ to be the
brain, but a lot of the discussion of it--and Universal Grammar--are totally
untethered by psychology and neuroscience.

For a while, it seemed like he regarded recursion as a key aspect of human
language, versus animal "communications." Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky had a
2002 article in Science that seemed to argue as much, and they were excited to
show that humans, but not monkeys, can learn center-embedded recursion
patterns[1]. However, Chomsky seems to have subtly backed away from that and
now says that recursion important but might not manifest itself in all human
languages (or something along those lines).

~~~
parenthephobia
That somebody genuinely disagrees with Chomsky's linguistic theories on their
own merit doesn't mean that other people don't want to prove his linguistic
theories wrong because they disagree with his politics. Both sorts of people
can exist.

~~~
mattkrause
Well sure. Unicorns _could_ exist too.

George Lakoff is one of his fiercest critics and I have a really hard time
believing that he is motivated by Chomsky's political views; Lakoff is
involved with various progressive and socialist think tanks himself. I'm not
sure about (e.g.) Postal, Ross, or McCawley but I've never heard anything
about their political animosity to Chomsky either.

If one wanted to go after Chomsky's political views, falsifying Universal
Grammar (whatever that means) seems like an oddly difficult and indirect way
to do so. Do you really think that someone decided that a deep dive into
recursive structures in Pirahã is the way to push for TPPA? I'm totally
willing to believe that more conservative linguists might get a _tiny_ bit
more of a thrill out of needling him, but again, this seems really unlikely to
be a driving force.

If there's any political force that drives people to go after Chomsky, it's
the one driving the academic job market. He is A Big Name, and conclusively
debunking his theories would set the debunker's career on the fast track. In
fact, even a high profile debate with him, assuming it wasn't a complete rout,
would probably benefit most careers.

------
x2398dh1
I believe the chart shown in the article titled, "Noam-enclature And The New
Linguistics," mischaracterizes Chomsky's theory, by conflating the commonly
used meaning of the word, "grammar," with grammar as it was defined in
Chomsky's paper. In essence, this chart is a straw man argument.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A680FCC2...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A680FCC2-FE3E-4FA4-A1623C6B4EDB9A79_source.png)

The top part of the chart shows, "the brain's innate sentence diagraming
machine," and then points toward a sentence structure broken down into
designators, adjectives, nouns and verbs, which is what the common definition
of the word, "grammar," means. This is not what Chomsky's theory stated.
Chomsky's theory defined grammar as (I'm paraphrasing) a system for
understanding language, involving a syntactic component (e.g. there should be
some kind of order), a semantic component (e.g. there should be some kind of
meaning) and a phonological component (e.g. there should be some kinds of
sounds).

That's it! There was no inherent underlying English grammar structure hard-
wired into babies' brains as the chart suggests. What is wired into a baby's
brain, which assists with language, is the ability to order sensory inputs in
a way that would result in language...that is what he called grammar.
Basically what Chomsky did is, "psychologize," linguistics and I am not
convinced by this article that this theory had been refuted. That would be
like saying that Einstein refuted Newton.

~~~
otabdeveloper1
> There was no inherent underlying English grammar structure hard-wired into
> babies' brains as the chart suggests.

There was in Chomsky's original theory. His original claims have been
significantly mellowed out after the mounting weight of counter-evidence
crashed down.

~~~
methehack
No, there wasn't. That's the poster's point. Universal grammar in Chomsky is
lower-level than any concrete language, English most definitely included.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar)
The first two sentences should suffice.

~~~
glup
The characterization on that page is not good: virtually no one disagrees with
"the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain". The substantive
disagreement is whether grammatical categories and relations (or other
knowledge that helps the child induce such) is hard-wired, or whether more
general-purpose learning mechanisms are sufficient to abstract this structure
from the environment.

~~~
dilemma
>virtually no one disagrees with "the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired
into the brain".

No, this is exactly where the field is split. Chomsky says that if a child
socializes with people speaking a language with each other, the child will
learn that language without teaching, punishment or reward. I.e. the human
mind is not a blank slate buy has innate capabilities. Ideologically, this is
an individualist take on linguistics.

The other side says that children have to be taught to speak a language
properly and that language is difficult. Ideologically, this is the
collectivist take on linguistics - children are blank slates to be filled in
by society.

The people that have a problem with Chomsky's ideas are authoritarian
collectivists. It's not about science.

~~~
andreasvc
You're making a straw man caricature out of the nativism detractors. Current
researchers do not claim that first language is taught, that's why the field
is called language acquisition regardless of whether one subscribes to
nativism. The more nuanced non-nativist theories argue that grammar learning
employs domain-general cognitive mechanisms, rather than language-specific
innate grammar knowledge or principles. It's quite a stretch to connect any of
this with political ideologies.

------
rflrob
>In the second half of the 20th century, it was becoming ever clearer that our
unique evolutionary history was responsible for many aspects of our unique
human psychology

In my experience, most "evolutionary psychology" stories are also ad hoc,
unfalsifiable at best, and loaded with cultural biases from those who propose
them. We don't have a good idea of what traits actually carry a selective
advantage, and those advantages are often highly context dependent. The brain,
culture, and evolution are both incredibly complex, and so you can often find
some way to smush puzzle pieces together that almost works, but that doesn't
mean that's what's actually happening.

~~~
raverbashing
Correct

A lot of traits and variances have no clear evolutionary advantage, most of
the time it's fudging and trying to come up with an explanation for a certain
behaviour

There aren't good evolutionary explanations for a lot of physical traits, let
alone for psychological ones

------
Ologn
> when linguists actually went looking at the variation in languages across
> the world, they found counterexamples to the claim that this type of
> recursion was an essential property of language. Some languages—the
> Amazonian Pirahã, for in­­stance—seem to get by without Chomskyan recursion.

This is a pretty thin counter-example. A Christian missionary who became a
linguist claimed that the Pirahã language had recursion. Then he later claimed
that it did not have recursion. Linguists went down to study the Pirahã and
found out that his first reports of Pirahã being recursive were correct, as
they observed recursion in Pirahã language when they were there.

The authors return to this language spoken by less than 400 people later on:

> Chomsky defenders have responded that just be­­cause a language lacks a
> certain tool—recursion, for example—does not mean that it is not in the tool
> kit... makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in
> places they verge on the unfalsifiable.

Recursion in languages has not been falsified - it has been found in all
languages, including Pirahã.

~~~
mattkrause
I think you're giving Dan Everett (the person you're describing) a short
shrift here.

He says that his initial pro-recursion reports were attempting to fit Pirahã
into the standard Chomskyian UG framework of the time. However, as he learned
the language better, he started to realize that it _didn 't_ really fit and he
was seeing the things he expected to see. For example, he initially described
-sai as a nominializer (an "adapter" that lets other parts of speech be used
in constructions that expect a noun). His later reports argue that it's
actually not a nominalizer, but marks old information ("As you know Bob").

As far as I know, there is not actually a ton of non-Everett data on Pirahã.

The most well-known paper that disagrees with Everett is probably Nevins,
Pesetsky and Rodrigues (2009), which reanalyzes Everett's published work. They
start with a list of properties are are supposedly unique to Pirahã, and claim
that many of these show up in familiar languages. However, I don't find that
paper completely convincing. For example, Pirahã possessives can't be
embedded: the equivalent of "John's brother's house" is ungrammatical and
needs to be rendered as "John has a brother. The brother has a house." NPR
argue that German has a similar restriction. This is true, sort of, in that
"Hansens Auto" (Hans's car) is grammatical, but "*Hansens Autos Motor"
("Hans's car's motor") is not. However, this occurs because of a totally
unrelated restriction: you can say something like "Hansens Vaters Frau" (Han's
father's wife) because everyone involved is animate, and there's an alternate
route involving "von" for embedding other kinds of possessives (as in "the
motor of John's car"). Pirahã, as far as I know, does not have any possessive
embedding at all, which does make it different from German.

I'm also not sure that cherry-picking individual examples from many other
languages successfully refutes Pirahã's exceptionalism. German may prohibit
embedding in this circumstance and Hindi in that one, but surely the
interesting part is that Pirahã seems to prohibit it everywhere. As an
analogy, I know people who do not write with their left hands, and other folks
who don't write with their right hands. However, this doesn't imply that hands
aren't involved in writing at all.

Realistically, this debate is going to be hard to settle without some more
data. Unfortunately, Pirahã is said to be impossibly difficult to learn and
there aren't a ton of native speakers wandering around universities. There is
some data kicking around from another Australian language which may have
similar properties, which might help.

------
dschiptsov
While Chomsky's attempt to formalize a grammar is wonderful, the probabilistic
approach (based on weights) to language advocated by Norvig is, it seems, more
close to what is going on inside the brain.

Brain does not perform recursive algebraic simplifications (which is,
probably, the most beautiful abstraction humans have produced - fixed points,
Y-Combinator, etc), it performs structure-based pattern matching - "it looks
like a duck".

Natural selection, it seems, would select a crudest, good-enough model, full
of cues, short-cuts and heuristics learned from environment, instead of
evolving a beautiful, universal recursive meta-circular evaluator, which MIT
guys are worshiping (what else there is to worship, but a beauty?!)

And, of course, mutually recursive processes (physical processes which could
be abstracted out and formalized that way) are everywhere in biology. It just
happen that language is a pattern matching, not an algebra, like everything
else in the brain. Algebras, like numbers, does not exist outside our heads.)

~~~
Retra
Algebra and pattern matching are basically the same thing, aren't they? To
find a solution to an algebraic problem, you pattern match on the problem
structure and see what falls out. To solve a pattern matching problem, you
perform algebraic transformations to isolate the pattern being matched.

>Algebras, like numbers, does not exist outside our heads

Models are called models because they are not the things they model. Anything
that is a model is an approximation. This doesn't mean they don't exist
outside our heads. If that were true, there wouldn't be any computers.

~~~
visarga
> Algebra and pattern matching are basically the same thing

The difference is that pattern matching is done on a model of the world
provided by words, instead of applying it directly to senses.

In reinforcement learning there is an approach to model the world first, then
run RL on top of the model, because that would provide a way for the agent to
imagine possible outcomes without the need to try them first in actuality.
Model based RL is a refinement of direct RL and is essential for thinking.

~~~
ChoHag
Pattern matching is done on literally every sensory nerve impulse the brain
receives.

------
cma
The article makes it sound like Chomsky's early approach was similar to the
grammar you learn in school. That's actually what linguistic classification
was like before Chomsky as I understand it. It's first mention of recursion is
of a Chomsky paper from 2002, where everything is done with just a few rules,
but recursion was also critical to Chomsky's earliest results.

Coming away reading it I would think Chomsky had a really naive approach that
had to be modified with Principles and Parameters just to handle Spanish first
person verbs, because his program was so narrow they hadn't bothered to
consider Spanish. Then it wasn't until 2002 that they started handling
recursion.

It doesn't quite say that directly, but that is just what I think someone
might take away from reading the intro.

------
mturmon
Anyone else feel that ending the first section with the well-known "science
progresses one funeral at a time" quote is rather too sharply pointed, given
Chomsky's age?

~~~
dilemma
Yes, I felt it to be extremely poor taste.

------
glup
My colleagues and I just got a paper accepted at Psych Science on this debate:
we looked at the degree of generalization kids show in using
determiners/articles ('a','an' or 'the') with nouns, also accounting for
imitation of caregiver speech. If a child has heard "the cat" and "a cat", but
only ever "the fish", when do they know they can generalize and say "a fish"?
TLDR is that it's hard to say conclusively without larger samples of caregiver
speech, but it seems like early speech (<2 yrs) has little evidence of
category-based generalization, but it rapidly increases after that. Of course
it's possible to contest that kids have more grammatical knowledge than what's
reflected in what they say (the performance vs. competence distinction), but
these methods can't address that.

[http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/meylan-inpress-
psychs...](http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/meylan-inpress-psychsci.pdf)

HN readers may appreciate the methodology: we construct a beta-binomial model
as a simple approximation of the generative process, and measure how the
parameters change over time when we fit to read data. The child's definite vs.
indefinite uses for each noun are treated as flips of a weighted coin; the
weighting is determined by the definite and indefinite uses by the parent
combined with a beta prior. The peakedness of the beta prior indicates how
similar a kid thinks nouns will be to one another (in the absence of
evidence). We fit this model to all the successive samples of a bunch of
longitudinal developmental datasets, including the Speechome project out of
MIT. Nonzero, constant peakedness would be consistent with access to syntactic
categories from birth; increasing peakedness of the scale parameter
corresponds to growing syntactic generalization.

------
raverbashing
After reading the article, I still have to side with Chomsky on this one

Universal grammar may not exist (exactly) as he described but "young children
use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such
as the ability to classify the world into categories, and to understand the
relations among things"

And what says this is not language related? It's an underlying structure that
helps organize concepts. Who says thinking in shapes or concepts _is not a_
language?

Also, it's not because some languages have not evolved recursion that it's not
a defying trait. In the same way western languages are not tonal but it
doesn't mean a western kid wouldn't be able to learn them

~~~
visarga
> ability to classify the world into categories ... what says this is not
> language related

It is data related. The patterns exists in the data itself, young children are
just uncovering the latent factors that explain the data. So, the ability of
children is to learn from patterns.

~~~
raverbashing
> It is data related. The patterns exists in the data itself

This is a cop out. You can't get semantics (and grammar) out of "types of
words" only (or you couldn't have declensions)

The important thing about recursion is not that it doesn't exist in some
places, but the fact that _it exists_.

The language capabilities of the brain seem to be an "hardware accelerated"
heuristic that allows things to be connected more easily

Given that cognitive psychologists can't even reproduce the experiments
they're supposedly experts of, I'm not holding my breath from an explanation
from them

------
fsloth
"I have not failed, I have just learned thousands of of ways which don't work"
applies to science as well. It bothers me popular science often presents
ground breaking work as a direct competitor to an established theory, while
usually the established theory is a necessary stepping stone to the new one.
usually, because it's more obvious approach and explains some aspects of the
system. The old theory can be used as an instrument to gauge the qualities of
the system under observation, and incompatibilities found provide then fertile
material for new understanding.

~~~
cossatot
Unfortunately, this is often the rhetorical approach commonly employed in
unpopular, ahem, professional science as well. No one wants incremental
progress, everything has to be transformative (science's _disruptive_ ).

Fortunately, this has yet to pervade other industries we all know and love.

------
pjlegato
The article, and many professional functionalist lingusts, confuse Chomsky's
Universal Grammar theory and its later "parameters" revision with the much
more general hypothesis, also advocated by Chomsky, that human language
grammar is somehow computable in a logical sense, formed through the
application of objective and universal (with a small "u") logical rules. They
prefer to view language rather as some sort of nebulous and inherently
unquantifiable expression of the human spirit that is intrinsically bound to
the unique cultural attributes of the society that produces it, a precious
snowflake different from all others, which cannot be related to other
languages through universal logical principles.

They feel that the notion of universal (small U) principles of grammar somehow
robs language of some essential human qualia by reducing it to a mere
mechanism, and moreover many postmodernist linguists believe that the very
idea of objectivity in language, to include supposed universal grammatical
principles, is somehow part of a broader imperialistic plot by evil white
heterosexual men to oppress and subjugate the glorious Other through malicious
efforts of universal grammatical classification. (Yes, seriously. Your tax
dollars support more than a few professors who believe this is true, in all
seriousness, and teach it to impressionable young students every day.)

These fears do not, however, have any bearing whatsoever on whether human
language is, as a matter of fact, computable, the result of some set of
universal logical principles. It either is or it isn't, and wishful thinking
about how we would _like_ to conceive of language has no bearing on whether
that is true or not. That is not how scientific knowledge works. (Of course,
many denounce the scientific method itself as merely another tool used by evil
white straight men to oppress the Other, and this despite the fact that it was
invented by Arabs.)

The anti-computation camp frequently conflates Universal Grammar or parameters
theory with the question of computability in general. When any evidence comes
out that shows that a specific portion of UG is probably not true, they crow
triumphantly about how language is really fundamentally something ineffable
and pseudo-mystical, not able to be computed by logic.

UG and the computability question are not the same thing. UG is a specific
proposed model of language computation. It has largely been falsified, shown
to be inconsistent with the empirical evidence of how actual languages work.
That is fine. This does not imply anything at all about whether language is
universally computable according to _some_ model.

It just tells us that language is not computable according to _that_ model,
not that it is not computable according to _any_ model.

~~~
glup
>> When any evidence comes out that shows that a specific portion of UG is
probably not true, they crow triumphantly about how language is really
fundamentally something ineffable and pseudo-mystical, not able to be computed
by logic.

I think the overwhelming mass of work critical of Chomsky treats it as a
computational object; the emphasis changes from global computability to local
inference: what can a learner infer about the structural properties of a
language? How can people parse complex sentence structures and ascribe meaning
to them? Hence the rapid adoption of machine learning for explaining human
behavior in psycholinguistics, developmental linguistics, and historical
linguistics. Nothing pseudo-mystical there.

~~~
pjlegato
Sure, of course not _all_ linguists who disagree with UG are anti-
computationalists. (I don't know about "the overwhelming mass," but that is
possibly the result of my exposure to a local concentration of anti-
computationalists.) Many tentatively accept some sort of computability while
rejecting the specific model of UG, as you correctly note.

My comment was directed at the author of the specific article, and at many
functionalist and postmodernist linguists, who actively conflate the question
of computability in general with the validity of UG as a specific model.

------
js8
So, if there is no innate grammar, why the phrase "large red ball" feels more
correct than "red large ball", and in many languages (I can confirm only two)?
If this is just a learned relationship between things, the order of the
adjectives shouldn't matter. Furthermore, in Czech, words in sentence can be
in many different orders (in particular, the ending word is the one that has
emphasis), but order of adjectives still matters (or at least some feel right
and some wrong). So we can learn and deal with different orderings of words.

~~~
drauh
Because you're an English speaker?

In Malay it's "ball red large"

Also this has been making the rounds:

[https://imgur.com/a/tDzy2](https://imgur.com/a/tDzy2)

~~~
radarsat1
Oh my god, a png of a twitter featuring a png. What is this world we have
created.

Anyways.. it's pretty damn interesting. When I read it, I seriously read the
last sentence as "great green dragon" without thinking, then went back and saw
that I actually read the words in the wrong order.

Oddly enough, a green great dragon makes me think there would be some distinct
species of dragon called the "great dragon", that are sometimes green, whereas
"great green dragon" makes me think of just a very large, green, run-of-the-
mill dragon.

However, all of this seems to me entirely related to training, getting very
very used to things being expressed in a certain way. I have no idea how it
could relate to some "innate" idea of grammar, especially since, as others
have pointed out, this rule and many others only hold for English. Any
bilingual individual can tell straight away that these things are all about
memory -- nothing "innate" about a bunch of arbitrary rules.

------
pjdorrell
My own theory of language acquisition and music:
[http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheState...](http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheStateOfMindInducedByMusic.html).

I don't assume any pre-existing "universal grammar".

What I do assume is a pre-existing classification of sounds into language and
non-language. This hypothesis is somewhat confirmed by the recent results as
described at
[http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-...](http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-5)
(and see
[http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfCompone...](http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfComponentFive.html)).

