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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

#41

Post by resemblance »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #29
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?

Not only are there people who seriously suggest it, but most neuroscientists think Chomsky is completely wrong, and have quite a bit of data to back it up. The notion of innate grammers has been pretty much replaced with evidence that you get much better and more human like performance (and the ability to actually learn the bloody things) out of RNNs and the like. The interesting question is why RNNs are able to prod…

An rnns success is related to, and determined by the programmers model of the space.

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

#42

Post by cmarschner »

MrQuincle wrote: post #35

I think we also have visual grammars. We are surprised if heavy and large objects are on top of light and small objects. We have priors on lighting and shadows, depth and occlusion, inside and outside. 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 th…

I'm not sure about that. A newborn first learns to recognize shapes, then starts exploring its environment using hand-eye coordination. It learns the rules of gravity by watching and feeling. It has a few inborn reflexes, like looking for the source of milk right after birth, but the physics engine seems very much a learnt thing. Also it seems the fundamental physics laws can easily be learnt by a system like the brain (we can even do it with artificial neural nets). Visual cortex seems to be similarly simple. Only for understanding language we have been missing a couple of pieces to the puzzle. That seems still like a miracle. Disclaimer: anecdotal evidence.

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

#43

Post by J-dawg »

logicallee wrote: post #17
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 th…

Kudos for getting a 'rickroll' into a conversation about linguistics!

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

#44

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

logicallee wrote: post #17
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 th…

>> if it's so massively parallel, why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time?

For fun, I once had two friends speak to me simultaneously, one in each ear. We swapped places and did that to each other a few times. Result: nope, our language understanding unit is not parallel. You can either take in a wall of sound, OR focus to a string of words and understand its meaning. It might feel like you can almost do both at the same time and pick up two different threads of conversation at the same time, but it's always just beyond your reach. At best you can swap between threads quickly, if the conversations permit it (so forget it both/all conversations are rapid-fire and heavy with nuance etc).

I also note that our language generation units are not parallel. We can utter one syllable at a time. So maybe there's not much point in understanding multiple syllables at a time?

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

#45

Post by [deleted] »

logicallee wrote: post #17
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 th…

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by bonzini »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #19
brenschluss wrote: post #11

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…

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

I'm not sure I agree, not entirely at least. "Thinking while speaking" is something I associate to speaking a second language that you don't really master. Then you really think in one language, think about the translation, and speak. If I speak in my native language or in English, I don't think about the words I'm saying or about how I'm using the language, there's a much bigger component of instinct and thoughts can be much more impulsive.

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

#47

Post by raverbashing »

logicallee wrote: post #27
raverbashing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time? Because in English word order is important (in fact, in most languages) It would be fun to learn a completely independent word order language (I suspect Latin is like that) but I suspect this is one of the reasons this aspect died in romance languages, it's harder to understand and relying on word order makes it easier

so I speak such a language, but I still don't read it in parallel. also this parallel pattern-matching idea doesn't explain sentences that when parsed carefully are clearly ungrammatical: I had inserted an error at the end of my first paragraph of the previous comment to illustrate this.

Yeah I agree it's not 100% parallel (that's why I took it out of your quote)

We kinda ignore mistakes when they don't clash with our heuristics (nobody reads every word, especially stop words)

You can see how people make mistakes by writing the way the words sound rather than constructing the phrase (and this happens accidentally as well, not because the person doesn't know the right words)

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

#48

Post by palosanto »

"Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar;"

Fascinating article, highly recommended. Not trying to be nitpicky but I'm going to need a citation or few to support some of the claims made about "neuroscientists and psychologists"... just saying.

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

#49

Post by phphphph »

palosanto wrote: post #48

"Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar;" Fascinating article, highly recommended. Not trying to be nitpicky but I'm going to need a citation or few to support some of the claims made about "neuroscientists and psychologists"... just saying.

[Here might be a good start](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures#Criticism...)

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

#50

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #29
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?

Not only are there people who seriously suggest it, but most neuroscientists think Chomsky is completely wrong, and have quite a bit of data to back it up. The notion of innate grammers has been pretty much replaced with evidence that you get much better and more human like performance (and the ability to actually learn the bloody things) out of RNNs and the like. The interesting question is why RNNs are able to prod…

There's a misconception here: deep neural networks are used to learn grammar models, or the features for grammar models and so on, but the predominant model of natural language is still based on grammars.

Google "Stanford parser". This is a state of the art natural language parser and like all parsers it relies on a grammar. The grammar it uses is a dependency grammar, a different grammar than the phrase structure grammars proposed by Chomsky and also one that is built in a probabilistic manner, but a grammar nonetheless.

Also, it's really not the case that you get better performance out of neural network models of language, let alone "human like performance". We're very far from that still.

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