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How the Brain Parses Language

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#11

Post by lapcat »

I wouldn't read too much into the LLM analogy. The interview is disappointingly short, filled with a bunch of unnecessarily tall photgraphs, and the interviewer, the one who brought up LLMs and ChatGPT and has a history of writing AI articles (https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/john-pavlus/), almost seemed to have an agenda to contextualize the research in this way. In general, except in a hostile context such as politics, interviewees tend to be agreeable and cooperative with interviewers, which means that interviews can be steered in a predetermined way, probably for clickbait here.

In any case, there's a key disanalogy:

> Unlike a large language model, the human language network doesn’t string words into plausible-sounding patterns with nobody home; instead, it acts as a translator between external perceptions (such as speech, writing and sign language) and representations of meaning encoded in other parts of the brain (including episodic memory and social cognition, which LLMs don’t possess).

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#12

Post by lapcat »

liampulles wrote: post #9

What I'm curious about is what the language parts of the human brain look like for babies and toddlers. Humans obviously have a bunch of languages they can speak, and toddlers pick up the language that their guardians speak around their home, so there seems to be machinery there that is for the task of "online" learning.

I think this quote may speak to the question:

> The brain’s general object-recognition machinery is at the same level of abstractness as the language network. It’s not so different from some higher-level visual areas such as the inferotemporal cortex (opens a new tab) storing bits of object shapes, or the fusiform face area storing a basic face template.

In other words, it sounds like the brain may start with the same basic methods of pattern matching for many different contexts, but then different areas of the brain specialize in looking for patterns in specific contexts such as vision or language.

This seems to align with the research of Jenny Saffran, for example, who has studied how babies recognize language, arguing that this is largely statistical pattern matching.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#13

Post by qqxufo1 »

If the brain's language network is only for "packaging words" and not for actual logic or reasoning, why does writing or speaking our messy thoughts out loud suddenly make them feel more logical? Is language actually helping us think, or is it just a filter that forces our chaotic ideas into a structure we can finally understand?

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#14

Post by mullsork »

lapcat wrote: post #12
liampulles wrote: post #9

What I'm curious about is what the language parts of the human brain look like for babies and toddlers. Humans obviously have a bunch of languages they can speak, and toddlers pick up the language that their guardians speak around their home, so there seems to be machinery there that is for the task of "online" learning.

I think this quote may speak to the question: > The brain’s general object-recognition machinery is at the same level of abstractness as the language network. It’s not so different from some higher-level visual areas such as the inferotemporal cortex (opens a new tab) storing bits of object shapes, or the fusiform face area storing a basic face template. In other words, it sounds like the brain may start with the sam…

In the series Babies by Netflix some of her research on this topic is covered. Season 1 Episode 4 "First Words."

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#15

Post by Anon84 »

liampulles wrote: post #9

What I'm curious about is what the language parts of the human brain look like for babies and toddlers. Humans obviously have a bunch of languages they can speak, and toddlers pick up the language that their guardians speak around their home, so there seems to be machinery there that is for the task of "online" learning.

Me too! Babies and toddlers brains are like sponges. We started teaching my baby 3 languages since birth (essentially I always spoken with her in my native language, my wife in hers and gets English from living in the US). She’s not even 4 yet an fully fluent in all three and seemlessly jumps back and forth between them. (To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence)

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#16

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tcsenpai wrote: post #6

> But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM? It almost seems like we got inspiration from our brain to build neural networks!

It isn’t clear though. Neural networks were inspired by the brain, but transformers? It is totally plausible but do we really think just in words?

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#17

Post by netfortius »

Every time I read something like this reminds me of Maturana (of autopoiesis fame), who was among the first scientists from where I started gaining an interest in these areas. Relevant to his view, in the area of language, is the following:

"We human beings are living systems that exist in language. This means that although we exist as human beings in language and although our cognitive domains (domains of adequate actions) as such take place in the domain of languaging, our languaging takes place through our operation as living systems. Accordingly, in what follows I shall consider what takes place in language[,] as language arises as a biological phenomenon from the operation of living systems in recurrent interactions with conservation of organization and adaptation through their co-ontogenic structural drift, and thus show language as a consequence of the same mechanism that explains the phenomena of cognition:"

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#18

Post by Tor3 »

alfanick wrote: post #7

Anecdotal data, based on a sample of 1 (aka me). I'm originally Polish, but I would say my mother tongue is English. I also learned Latin as a kid/teen. Then learning any other languages is much easier, I also learned German and some Swiss German dialects. I can also do Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, Czech, some Serbo-Croation. I think being Polish makes learning languages easy - as we have a lot of creations in Po…

I speak several languages too, though definitely not as many as you do. I'm also in the process of learning a completely new one, at an advanced age relative to when I last learned a new one (I was in my thirties then). To me, my brain most definitely doesn't process human language the way it handles computer language. It's about as different as it can get. The latter is "learning", the former is "burn patterns into the brain", and learning a language can take years, at least at this age. Computer languages? Those can be picked up in as little as a weekend, and getting proficient isn't a multi-year or decade long process. It feels totally different for me (I've been learning new computer languages at the same time as I've been trying to get up to speed with a new human language).

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#19

Post by adamzwasserman »

There's an interesting falsifiable prediction lurking here. If the language network is essentially a parser/decoder that exploits statistical regularities in language structure, then languages with richer morphological marking (more redundant grammatical signals) should be "easier" to parse — the structure is more explicitly marked in the signal itself.

French has obligatory subject-verb agreement, gender marking on articles/adjectives, and rich verbal morphology. English has largely shed these. If you trained identical neural networks on French vs English corpora, holding everything else constant, you might expect French models to hit certain capability thresholds earlier — not because of anything about the network, but because the language itself carries more redundant structural information per token.

This would support Fedorenko's view that the language network is revealing structure already present in language, rather than constructing it. The "LLM in your head" isn't doing the thinking — it's a lookup/decode system optimized for whatever linguistic code you learned.

(Disclosure: I'm running this exact experiment. Preregistration: https://osf.io/sj48b)

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#20

Post by adamzwasserman »

lapcat wrote: post #11

I wouldn't read too much into the LLM analogy. The interview is disappointingly short, filled with a bunch of unnecessarily tall photgraphs, and the interviewer, the one who brought up LLMs and ChatGPT and has a history of writing AI articles ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/john-pavlus/ ), almost seemed to have an agenda to contextualize the research in this way. In general, except in a hostile context such…

The disanalogy you quote might actually be the key insight. What if language operates at two levels, like Kahneman's System 1/2?

Level 1: Nearly autonomic — pattern-matched language that acts directly on the nervous system. Evidence: how insults land before you "process" them, how fluent speakers produce speech faster than conscious deliberation allows, and the entire body of work on hypnotic suggestion, which relies on language bypassing conscious evaluation entirely.

Level 2: The conscious formulation you describe — the translator between perception and meaning.

LLMs might be decent models of Level 1 but have nothing corresponding to Level 2. Fedorenko's "glorified parser" could be the Level 1 system.

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