31–40 of 95 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pattern detection. Pattern happens to be grammar.
However, patterns are language dependent. They don't mention what happened when an English only speaker heard a Chinese phrase.
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 th…
I actually had to read the sentence about 3 times, and force myself to read it slowly word by word, before I spotted it.
We often don't read one word at a time.
I agree with you that "massively parallel" is probably drastically overstating it, though.
> 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 always think that "human is born with some miracle thing" is quite suspicious. How can orderliness be born out of no where (no work spent, no energy consumed)? The probability of orderliness to be spontaneously assembled itself must be infinitesimally small.
Grammar might evolve along the way (due to statistical learning) but it seems too good to be true if it's born out of no where.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 coul…
My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar.
The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1]
[1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
We solve these statistically with complex priors and likelihoods. How much you can shove into the prior is the question of universal grammar. That you are born with linguistic priors is I think not so surprising. If they are of the old-fashioned symbolic variety that Chomsky proposes, would be surprising. It's way too "clean" for my liking, personal opinion!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
(Any errors in this comment due to the fact that I wrote it without thinking.)
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…
Thanks for the second point. It's frustrated when they write titles like that for the public. I always think that "human is born with some miracle thing" is quite suspicious. How can orderliness be born out of no where (no work spent, no energy consumed)? The probability of orderliness to be spontaneously assembled itself must be infinitesimally small. Grammar might evolve along the way (due to statistical learning)…
> 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…
This is also why monkeys can never be trained to learn human language [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar#.22I-...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 coul…
Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope? My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball does…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Actually if you look at research done on freestyle rappers, you'll find similar mechanisms as those found in great basketball players. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroa... Being in a flow state seems very similar to being in the zone.