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How the Brain Parses Language

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#21

Post by griffzhowl »

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.

One part of the story I found fascinating is the overlap in infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and hierarchical syntax. These diverge and specialize in adults. The homologous brain region in primates is involved in motor planning.

It's an interesting hint at the deeper evolutionary origins of language in the ability to plan complex actions, providing a neural basis for the observation that language and action planning have this common structure of an overall goal that can be decomposed into a structure of subgoals, which we see formalized in computer programs too.

This is an older reference (1991) where I first heard about it. there are more recent studies reinforcing various aspects of it but I didn't find one that was as comprehensive

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00071235

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#22

Post by phkahler »

Anon84 wrote: post #15
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)

>> To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence

I knew two brothers that would mix words from different languages while speaking to each other because they shared the same set of languages and presumably used the best words to express their thoughts.

Your daughter probably knows other people generally speak and understand one language at a time and just conforms because its most effective.

I'm not sure if or at what age it might be good to start mixing languages with others who can.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#23

Post by lapcat »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #20
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…

> LLMs might be decent models of Level 1

I don't think so. Fast speakers and hyponotized people are still clearly conscious and "at home" inside, vastly more "human" than any LLM. Deliberation and evaluation imply thinking before you speak but do not imply that you can't otherwise think while you speak.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#24

Post by griffzhowl »

One disanalogy between human language use and LLMs is that language evolved to fit the human brain, which was already structured by millions of years of primate social life. This is more or less the reverse situation to a neural network trained on a large text corpus.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#25

Post by vkazanov »

Tor3 wrote: post #18
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…

Computer languages are much simpler than human languages, and they also operate in similar kind of logical ways. I definitely remember how hard was to go from pascal to C to Cpp to Python to prolog to haskell to SQL... until at some point nothing was new.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#26

Post by rdtsc »

> But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM?

With every technological breakthrough we always posit that the brain has to work like the newly discovered thing. At various times brains were hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, like a computer, like a network. Now, of course, the brain has to be like an LLM.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#27

Post by Tor3 »

vkazanov wrote: post #25
Tor3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Computer languages are much simpler than human languages, and they also operate in similar kind of logical ways. I definitely remember how hard was to go from pascal to C to Cpp to Python to prolog to haskell to SQL... until at some point nothing was new.

To me, working with a computer language involves specific thinking, constructing stuff in my mind. But human language is nothing of the sort, though it's possible to kind of do the same if I sit down and try to polish a written sentence. But talking in, and understanding a conversation is as far from this as I can imagine. And the learning process is so extremely different.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#28

Post by fellowniusmonk »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #19

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…

Dyslexia seems to be more of an issue in English than other languages right?

But also, maybe the difficulty of parsing recruits other/executive function and is beneficial in other ways?

The per phoneme density/efficiency of English is supposed to be quite high as an emergent trade language.

Perhapse speaking a certain language would promote slower more intentional parsing, humility through syntax uncertainty, maybe not, all I know is that from a global network resilience perspective it's good that dumb memes have difficulty propagating across cultures/languages.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#29

Post by adamzwasserman »

lapcat wrote: post #23
adamzwasserman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> LLMs might be decent models of Level 1 I don't think so. Fast speakers and hyponotized people are still clearly conscious and "at home" inside, vastly more "human" than any LLM. Deliberation and evaluation imply thinking before you speak but do not imply that you can't otherwise think while you speak.

The body of knowledge on Ericksonian hypnotherapy is pretty clear that the effect of language on Level 1 is orthogonal to, and sometimes even opposed to, conscious processes.

I became interested after being medically hypnotized for kidney stone pain. As the hypnotist spoke, I was consciously thinking: "this is dumb, it will never work." And yet it did.

That's exactly your point — I was fully conscious and "at home" the whole time, yet something was processing and acting on the language independently. The question is whether that something shares any computational properties with LLMs, not whether the whole system does.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#30

Post by adamzwasserman »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #28
adamzwasserman wrote: post #19

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…

Dyslexia seems to be more of an issue in English than other languages right? But also, maybe the difficulty of parsing recruits other/executive function and is beneficial in other ways? The per phoneme density/efficiency of English is supposed to be quite high as an emergent trade language. Perhapse speaking a certain language would promote slower more intentional parsing, humility through syntax uncertainty, maybe n…

The dyslexia point is interesting; yes, English orthography causes more reading disorders than languages with more regular spelling-to-sound mappings (Italian, Finnish, etc.). That's consistent with the parser having to work harder when the signal is noisier.

Your intuition about "slower more intentional parsing" connects to something I'm exploring: we may parse language at two levels simultaneously; a fast, nearly autonomic level (think: how insults land before you consciously process them) and a slower deliberate level. Whether those levels interact differently across languages is an open question.

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