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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

#21

Post by david_ar »

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?

Yes, (most) linguists seem to be unique in treating this as dogma. It's not the only possible explanation consistent with current evidence.

Edit: by "innate", people mean that it's something you're born with, rather than learned through experience.

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

#22

Post by elcct »

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…

Pattern detection. Pattern happens to be grammar.

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

#23

Post by raverbashing »

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?

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

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

#24

Post by raverbashing »

elcct wrote: post #22
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…

Pattern detection. Pattern happens to be grammar.

However, patterns are language dependent. They don't mention what happened when an English only speaker heard a Chinese phrase.

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

#25

Post by mindcrime »

dlwh wrote: post #18
mindcrime wrote: post #8

This appears to be the paper in question: http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/dp_papers/Ding_nn2015.pdf Also, for more background on the idea of the "Universal Grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

Not a neuroscientist, but I do do NLP, and I only lightly skimmed the paper. This doesn't really speak to UG. First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment. Second, they looked at two languages with sentences of up…

First, you can believe in the structures they purport to show without accepting the existence of UG, by appealing to the existence of general mechanisms in the brain for assembling hierarchical structures, which is equally validated by this experiment.

That was kinda my impression as well, but I don't want to say much more as I'm so far from an expert on this and I'll probably just make an idiot out of myself. Still, as you say, it is interesting work in its own right.

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

#26

Post by linhchi »

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…

wait, i think that's a good comment. what if that "invisible grammar" they said was the result of the statistical process ? which means that it already emerges in childhood?

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

#27

Post by logicallee »

raverbashing wrote: post #23
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…

> 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.

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

#28

Post by jusssi »

brenschluss wrote: post #11
yongjik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this. However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion…

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?

It doesn't "know the formulas". However, it has accumulated a life time worth of statistics, which it uses to predict what's about to happen, all the time. So I can be immediately surprised when something unexpected happens. In that sense, there's a running physics simulator.

As for throwing the basketball, most people know (#) what the arc should be, and can immediately after the throw tell if a throw will hit or miss with reasonable accuracy, assuming a viewpoint that allows them to extract the movement accurately. The difficulty there is learning to execute that throw.

(#) edit, know as in "have learned", not as an innate ability.

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

#29

Post by hyperion2010 »

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 produce things that resemble formal languages at first pass.

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

#30

Post by will_pseudonym »

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…

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.

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