Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#21

Post by quanticle » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:25 AM UTC

atdt wrote: post #19

The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age. We also know that a stroke can seriously impair a person's ability to use language, even as their memory and powe…

>The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age.

Do you actually know that? Or are you supposing it because it makes sense? Given what I know about the differences in educational outcomes between socioeconomic groups in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate of language acquisition depended on the number and variety of words that a child hears. It may very well be the case that the child of the Oxbridge academics does pick up language more quickly simply because he or she is exposed to more of it.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#22

Post by jplasmeier » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:32 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #16

jplasmeier wrote: post #13

Today I learned about Betteridge's Law [0], which seems apt here. It states that when a news headline asks a question, the answer is always "no." When it applies to a paper, I'm disinclined to take the paper seriously... [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

This gets posted on EVERY submission ending in a question mark. It was old 2 years ago. Now it's just plain trite, pointless, tiresome and distracting.

Nevertheless, the title does read a bit like clickbait.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#23

Post by gaius » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:35 AM UTC

It's funny, in the 90s at college I knew some people in the Linguistics dept and even back then, people were saying, Chomsky's deep grammar is obviously nonsense but we have to learn it anyway because it's in the exam.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#24

Post by pekk » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:36 AM UTC

tzmudzin wrote: post #2

If you want to prove a scientist wrong, present evidence to the contrary rather than personal innuendos and hypotheses / observations without proof.

This is a good criticism of a number of Chomsky's polemical papers.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#25

Post by dtornabene » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:38 AM UTC

koverstreet wrote: post #7

Off topic, but as long as we have a Chomsky discussion - where would be a good place to start reading about his theories on the evolution of language? More on topic, the dude is a giant, and the linked pdf not worth the electrons it's printed on.

Some of the latter work. He had a book called New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, which is fairly accesible and also covers some historical work, including the necessary underpinning of "where did language come from". His work itself isn't as interested in the way languages evolve. That would ironically fall a bit more under the some of the paradigm he replaced. So Bloomfields book on language was in that tradition and an example of the type of scholarly work that contributes to langauge change over time. De Saussere (I believe, been over a decade since I studied this) did work on synchrony vs diachrony. There are actual journals as well at any decent university library or (sizable) city library that would allow you to dip your toe in to working scholarship and get a sense of how historical linguistics works, if thats what you're interested in.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#26

Post by pekk » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #21

atdt wrote: post #19

The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age. We also know that a stroke can seriously impair a person's ability to use language, even as their memory and powe…

>The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age. Do you actually know that? Or are you supposing it because it makes sense? Given what I know about the differenc…

It depends on which milestones you look at. Of course, if you pre-select milestones which kids hit at about the same rate, then all of those taken together will seem to approximately argue in favor of UG.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#27

Post by pekk » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:42 AM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #15

koverstreet wrote: post #7

Off topic, but as long as we have a Chomsky discussion - where would be a good place to start reading about his theories on the evolution of language? More on topic, the dude is a giant, and the linked pdf not worth the electrons it's printed on.

This paper is a good place to start lol. The paper begins with a summary of Chomsky's major contributions, and is fairly readable. The answer is no, Chomsky will probably never be blown out of the water. His hypothesis is evolving, though.

He has one hypothesis?

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#28

Post by pekk » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:44 AM UTC

curuinor wrote: post #10

It's interesting to think that connectionist theories of language are literally shipping on Google Translate and people still argue about Chomsky. Many of the cognitive scientists were poking about with neural nets too - and they were getting into huge arguments with Chomsky and like folks since the 80's.

To be fair, due to the nature of neural networks, there are a great number of domains where they can be applied in some way without that fact actually explaining anything about how the domain works.

For example, TD-Gammon plays a mean game of Backgammon, but this does not mean that Backgammon reduces to connectionism. TD-Gammon applies neural networks in a specific way with other algorithms involved, and then there are still underlying facts about what it takes to win at Backgammon which do not necessarily mandate anything that resembles connectionism.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#29

Post by fdej » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 6:01 AM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #21

atdt wrote: post #19

The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age. We also know that a stroke can seriously impair a person's ability to use language, even as their memory and powe…

>The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age. Do you actually know that? Or are you supposing it because it makes sense? Given what I know about the differenc…

Yes. Language acquisition follows a standard sequence with specific milestones universal to all languages. For example, the period around 6-12 months is critical for phonetic learning. Before 6 months, infants are able to discriminate between phonetic units present in any language, but after 12 months they are better at making distinctions that occur in their native language and worse at making distinctions that don't occur in their environment. For example, Japanese infants are just as good as American infants at distinguishing between r and l at birth, but lose some of this ability between 8-10 months.

(Chapter "Language", Principles of Neural Science, 5th ed.)

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#30

Post by TempleOSV409 » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 6:07 AM UTC

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