Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nyu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 95 posts

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

#51

Post by agumonkey »

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…

And I believe in gravity influenced perception. Verticality isn't wired the same way as horizontality in our minds.

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

#52

Post by MawNicker »

vidarh wrote: post #32
logicallee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. 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.

I have a sense of what common words are. I can enter a mode where it's as if I can't see them. I just see extremely specific words. Names. Places. Things. If the meaning of these objects is obvious, then I can mostly ignore ambiguities in the construction of the sentence. I just move on. When ambiguity explodes I backtrack and read sequentially. I think it's basically just thorough skimming. Also that the continuous resolution of ambiguity is a trained (massively parallel?) skill.

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

#53

Post by cma »

cmarschner wrote: post #42
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 bra…

In experiments, a newborn of a few hours will reflexively dodge/cower from a quickly growing shape circle on a screen (something is approaching and about to collide!). It has no experience at that point of being struck by any moving object or anything like that.

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

#55

Post by illumen »

cma wrote: post #53
cmarschner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bra…

In experiments, a newborn of a few hours will reflexively dodge/cower from a quickly growing shape circle on a screen (something is approaching and about to collide!). It has no experience at that point of being struck by any moving object or anything like that.

New borns can barely hold their heads up.

Shine a light in their eyes, and yes they react. As does everything else with eyes.

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

#56

Post by GotAnyMegadeth »

illumen wrote: post #55
cma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In experiments, a newborn of a few hours will reflexively dodge/cower from a quickly growing shape circle on a screen (something is approaching and about to collide!). It has no experience at that point of being struck by any moving object or anything like that.

New borns can barely hold their heads up. Shine a light in their eyes, and yes they react. As does everything else with eyes.

Some animals (and people) with eyes are blind and so probably don't react when you shine a light at them.

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

#57

Post by lmm »

illumen wrote: post #55
cma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In experiments, a newborn of a few hours will reflexively dodge/cower from a quickly growing shape circle on a screen (something is approaching and about to collide!). It has no experience at that point of being struck by any moving object or anything like that.

New borns can barely hold their heads up. Shine a light in their eyes, and yes they react. As does everything else with eyes.

Couldn't you control for that by showing a shrinking circle on a screen? I'd be amazed if the experiment didn't do something like that.

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

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

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?

I think this is somewhat visible if you look at any kind of artistic writing. Or realize that grammar is made after the fact. The language itself never follows the grammar perfectly; grammar is a scaffolding we invent to help others learn the language.

Hell, you can communicate pretty well by just dropping nouns in sequence. That we have no problems understanding information presented in such way, or maths, or music notation, or programming languages, suggests that we don't have "internal grammars".

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

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Not consciously, no. I mean, do you really think about what you say when you speak in your native language, or do you just say it? It's actually a milestone in learning a foreign language - switching from thinking in native and translating into foreign to just thinking in foreign. If you find yourself running your internal monologue in a foreign language then you know your brain groks it.

And generally, mastering a task means switching it to unconscious mode. A good driver doesn't consciously think about turning the steering wheels or pressing pedals; they think about car (or rather, car+themselves system) moving faster or slower, going here or there. A soldier is trained until most of his tasks are muscle memory. A programmer doing what they really knows how to do will find themselves in the state of flow, etc. Mastery of a task is mentally abstracting it into just another basic capacity, just like breathing or moving your hands.

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

#60

Post by _0ffh »

Well, sooner or later it'll turn out it's all mostly that we're wired to learn grammars; and that we're biased towards learning some types of grammars better than others. (I think evidence has been plenty, even before this.)

That's not quite the same as how some people seem to understand Chomsky, a kind of grab-bag of hardwired grammar rules tucked away in some strand of DNA. But still, there it is.

Post reply on HN