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Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

nyu.edu

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Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#11

Post by brenschluss »

yongjik wrote: post #10
gliese1337 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are. Or at least, that we don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted just to that. The common counter to Chomsky's version of innate grammar is that language is the result of the interaction of a bunch of different cognitive modules which all evolved for different purposes, but which when combined happen to make language possible, and have since been under selection pressure to make language…

Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this. However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion…

Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net.

Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#13

Post by pazimzadeh »

> Their results showed that the subjects’ brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time.

How are they distinguishing between grammar that's encoded in the brain due to "nature" vs grammar that's encoded in the brain via "nurture"? I think we all knew that the brain has some mechanism to detect grammar.

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#14

Post by atdt »

gliese1337 wrote: post #5
yongjik wrote: post #4

> Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar; rather, it is based on both statistical calculations between words and sound cues to structure. Wait, is this true? There are people who seriously suggest that we don't have an innate notion of grammar?

Yes, there are. Or at least, that we don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted just to that. The common counter to Chomsky's version of innate grammar is that language is the result of the interaction of a bunch of different cognitive modules which all evolved for different purposes, but which when combined happen to make language possible, and have since been under selection pressure to make language…

I am not aware of Chomsky ever making the argument that language has a specific physical location with the brain, or that it is the achievement of a single organ which evolved for exactly this purpose. You may be confusing Chomsky with Jerry Fodor, whose "Modularity of Mind" was inspired by Chomsky's ideas (which it helped popularize).

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#16

Post by yongjik »

brenschluss wrote: post #11
yongjik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this. However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion…

Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net. Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?

I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity.

Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.)

Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that.

Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#17

Post by logicallee »

kazinator wrote: post #12

I suspect we have a "grammar" which is based on massively parallel pattern matching over a sequence of symbols of bounded length. (I.e. why we deal with ambiguities well, but not long sentences.)

if it's so massively parallel, why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time? why garden path sentences that mislead us as we build up an erroneous parse? sure there's some fuzzy pattern matching, but lexical parsing doesn't seem so massively parallel to me - more like a huge lookup table of fuzzy matches (including whole phrases, I don't have to say much about how I'm never gonna give you up, before that clicks for you), while we're also be parsing lexically with quite a formal grammar.

I put a grammar error into the last part of the last sentence purposefully, after I wrote it so you can read it and notice the error explicitly. (Whereas I would expect you to still figure out what I meant.) If it were just pattern matching that grammatical error wouldn't bother you at all even if you notice it, you would just go with the most likely fuzzy interpretation.

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#18

Post by dlwh »

mindcrime wrote: post #8

This appears to be the paper in question: http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf Also, for more background on the idea of the "Universal Grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

Not a neuroscientist, but I do do NLP, and I only lightly skimmed the paper.

This doesn't really speak to UG.

First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment.

Second, they looked at two languages with sentences of up to ~7 syllables each with at most two constituents (Noun Phrase Verb Phrase). You can't show any evidence for any hierarchy of interest in 7 syllables. They demonstrated that phrases exist and phrase boundaries exist, but it's entirely possible to have "flat' grammars without interesting hierarchy, especially in simple sentences. If they want to show interesting hierarchy, they should conduct experiments with more interesting structure (say, some internal PPs and some limited center embedding) and show something that correlates with multiple levels of the "stack" getting popped, or something.

It's still interesting work, but as usual oversold by the university press office.

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#19

Post by semi-extrinsic »

brenschluss wrote: post #11
yongjik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this. However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion…

Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net. Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?

A very important difference: someone who is good at throwing a basketball (or any sport, really) will "switch off" their brain while doing so. There's various words for this, e.g. "being in the zone". Ask the person to think about something while throwing, and they'll likely miss. It takes years of training to teach the brain to do the correct motions while " switched off".

Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.

Re: Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis

#20

Post by [deleted] »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #13

> Their results showed that the subjects’ brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time. How are they distinguishing between grammar that's encoded in the brain due to "nature" vs grammar that's encoded in the brain via "nurture"? I think we all knew that the brain has…

[deleted]
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