Neuroscientists find new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” thesis • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by qbrass » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

>also this parallel pattern-matching idea doesn't explain sentences that when parsed carefully are clearly ungrammatical:

Your confidence threshold of the meaning of the sentence was reached, so you didn't wait for the rest of the results to come back before moving onto the next sentence.

Had you needed to understand the sentence sequentially, you would be less likely to miss the grammatical error because you wouldn't be able to skip the word.

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

#82

Post by mamcx » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #78

lawpoop wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since most babies tend to follow the steps of development according to a timeline (i.e. a, then b, then c, and never out of order), and typically on time, isn't this rather evidence that such neural system grow more than the physics system is learned? The idea that some complex systems can simply grow without inputs is not unfounded in the biological world -- witness, for example, grazing animals such as cows and gir…

The way you formulated that is fascinating and made me understand the whole debate a little better. The strict order in which we grasp things does indeed indicate that these basic skills are perhaps not left to chance waiting until the correct input is provided, but are hardwired into the process that develops our brains. I guess the Chomsky debate is whether grammar is one of those basic skills. Would two children l…

Deaf people? I read somewhere that some kids develop themselves a sign language without their parents help...

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

#83

Post by kazinator » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

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…

> why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time?

I don't read one word at a time, but scan larger chunks. For instance, I processed "if it's so massively parallel" simultaneously as one "picture".

Do you really read one word at a time? Try making a sheet of paper with a cutout that is approximately word-sized, and move that peephole over the text. Then you're reading one word at a time.

If that makes no difference to your reading efficiency, you could have some cognitive disability affecting reading.

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

#84

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #40

will_pseudonym wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And then consider that freestyle rapping is a formally demanding way of speaking, and that speaking is something people do all the time without much mental effort. Impressive rappers can produce rhyming and alliterating verses in "flow" but a normal dinner conversation is in flow by default (depending on how neurotic your dinner guests are).

Do the more neurotic dinner guests rhyme a lot?

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

#85

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

andreasvc wrote: post #69

hyperion2010 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. No not really. Barring concrete physiological evidence, innateness is simply an unfalsifiable position. I do think you can say that consensus among scientists might have shifted against innateness, but that…

Dammit, why do I always get carried away discussing details and forget the main point?

That, what you say- that's the business. An RNN (any ANN) is not a human brain. It is one model of the human brain, based on our very limited understanding of human brains. It doesn't matter what ANNs can and cannot do, how well or bad they perform, it tells us nothing much about how we do language; or vision, motion, decision-making, anything.

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

#86

Post by semi-extrinsic » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #36

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #19

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…

Language doesn't seem to require conscious thought either. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein talked about that a lot. The postulating of an internal thought process "behind" everything is basically what Heidegger spent his life refuting, from what I've read of Dreyfus's book... And Wittgenstein explains language as a tool that people use to get things done, more or less. You can talk without "really thinki…

I must admit I was thinking more about the mental process of constructing the content of e.g. an argument than of the process of putting the content into grammatically correct sentences. I completely agree you can talk, and even be gramatically correct, without really thinking.

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

#87

Post by auvrw » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

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…

> We solve these statistically with complex priors and likelihoods

"we interpret experimental results up to some order of approximation with..."

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

#88

Post by lawpoop » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #78

lawpoop wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since most babies tend to follow the steps of development according to a timeline (i.e. a, then b, then c, and never out of order), and typically on time, isn't this rather evidence that such neural system grow more than the physics system is learned? The idea that some complex systems can simply grow without inputs is not unfounded in the biological world -- witness, for example, grazing animals such as cows and gir…

The way you formulated that is fascinating and made me understand the whole debate a little better. The strict order in which we grasp things does indeed indicate that these basic skills are perhaps not left to chance waiting until the correct input is provided, but are hardwired into the process that develops our brains. I guess the Chomsky debate is whether grammar is one of those basic skills. Would two children l…

This has actually happened-- caveat, with deaf people (but sign language does have grammar)-- check out Nicaraguan Sign Language. Pinker has a good chapter on it in The Language Instinct.

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

#89

Post by eli_gottlieb » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 11:41 PM UTC

soheil wrote: post #38

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…

Your assumption is that all information necessary and sufficient to decode grammar into its constituents is detectable from the spoken words that a child hears. According to Chomsky there is a distinction between the I-Language versus E-Language [1] (internal/ex) namely because grammar in most human languages is not the most computationally efficient way of structuring sentences hence the need for an uniquely human/i…

>grammar in most human languages is not the most computationally efficient way of structuring sentences

Grammar in most human languages is structured to be information-theoretically efficient, which often winds up being vague, ambiguous, and context-dependent. It's basically a time-space trade-off for statistical inference.

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

#90

Post by kazinator » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 1:03 AM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #44

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'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 al…

> our language understanding unit is not parallel

Your experiment seems to rather point to the intuition that we don't have a plurality of these units which can operate independently, not that a single unit doesn't have a parallel architecture.

The parallel talk is being superimposed into effectively a single input going into the same unit. That unit doesn't have the processing layer to unravel this superimposed input into two streams of speech.