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How the Brain Parses Language

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#71

Post by mcswell »

Timwi wrote: post #10
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ev Fedorenko is a highly recognized cognitive scientist that has been studying how humans parse language for years. Of course this doesn't mean one shouldn't question what she says (that would be an obvious authority fallacy), but I do think it's fair to say that if you want to question it, the argument should be more elaborate that "this sounds like she has no idea of the topic".

I'm not the person you responded to, but I found the article unreadable because it kept going on about Ev’s life instead of her research. I'm sure her research is valuable and insightful, but with this style of reporting it is both inaccessible to me, and it gives me the (probably flawed) impression that her research isn't the part of her life that's supposed to be important or impressive.

FWIW, that's soft of the way a lot of physics books (not textbooks) approach the subject: Einstein/ Heisenberg/ Bohr/ Pauli/ Feynman/ Oppenheimer was this kind of person, oh, and by the way he came up with this theory of X. Apparently a lot of people like that way of presenting science, but it's not for everyone.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#72

Post by mcswell »

qqxufo1 wrote: post #13

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?

That's a really good question. I don't have an answer, or even the beginning of an answer, but I would hazard a guess that there is a feedback loop. So listening to yourself talk (or even better, putting your thoughts down in print) is sort of like listening to someone else talk, which puts new ideas into your mind, or causes you to better organize the ones you already have.

Doing mathematical proofs might be an extreme example of that: a mathematician has (I am told) an intuition--a thought--but has to work it out rigorously. Once they've done that, the intuition becomes much clearer. I guess.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#73

Post by mbg721 »

mcswell wrote: post #69
Anon84 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There's a lot more to language learning than being a "sponge". Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before. And the grammar is implicit in what we hear, so children need to extract it in a form that can be generalized to new thoughts and words.

This is why learning Latin the way I did (very methodically and technically, with no real speaking/responding) makes you good at parsing it, but not at speaking it. There are schools today where it's taught as if it were a spoken language.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#74

Post by alfanick »

mzs wrote: post #48
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 completely understand! I'm also Polish American. I have to say it helps when mother's side of family is Gdańsk+west and father's Lublin+east. My wife's family is all from Warsaw area and I had to translate for my father-in-law during a holiday to Władysławowo-Hel (probably helps my aunt's father's side is Kashubian too, mmm... dessert first). I was blown-away on holiday to Croatia. It was so unexpectedly relatively…

Kudos to you too. Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian I wouldn’t be able to comprehend ;) these are different beasts

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#76

Post by fuzzfactor »

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.

At that age, I always figured "Why parse?"

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#77

Post by tgv »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #63
tgv wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more differences between English and French than you just described, and they can affect your measurement. Even the corpora you use cannot be the same. There isn't "ceteris paribus" (holding everything else constant). The outcome of the experiment doesn't say anything about the hypothesis. You're also going to use an artificial neural network to make claims about the human brain? That distance is too large…

The confound concern is fair: no cross-linguistic comparison is perfectly controlled. The bet is that the effect size (if any) will be large enough to be informative despite the noise. But you're right that it's not ceteris paribus in a strict sense. Your proposal is interesting though. Synthetic manipulation of morphology within a single language. Have you seen this done? The challenge I'd anticipate is that "gender…

> The bet is that the effect size (if any) will be large enough to be informative despite the noise.

But you have no grounds to ascribe it to the posited difference. Finding no effect might yield more information, but that's hard: given the amount of noise, you're bound to find a great many effects.

> Have you seen this done?

Not in LLMs, but there have been experiments with regularizing languages, and getting people to learn them in Second Language Acquisition (L2) studies. But what I've seen is inconclusive and sometimes outright contradictory.

I think people have also looked via information theory at this. Probably using Markov models.

> Fedorenko's own comparison to "early LLMs" suggests she thinks the analogy has some merit.

I don't think she can seriously entertain that thought. We simply know practically nothing about language processes in the brain. What we know about the hardware is very different from LLMs, early or not.

Just to give an indication of how much we don't know: the Stroop effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect) is almost 100 years old. We have no idea what causes it. There's no working model of word recognition. There are only vague suggestions about the origin of the delay. We have no clue how the visual signals for the color and the letters are separated, where they join again, and how that's related to linguistic knowledge. And that's almost 100 years of very, very much research. IF you go to Google Scholar and type "Stroop task", you'll get 197.000 (!) hits. That's nearly 200k articles etc. resulting in no knowledge whatsoever about a very simple, artificial task.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#78

Post by griffzhowl »

mcswell wrote: post #70
griffzhowl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"overlap in infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and hierarchical syntax"---you didn't see that in the Quanta article, right? I went back and looked, but can't find it mentioned anywhere.

Not from the quanta article. By "story" I just meant the general story of the neural basis for language. What I mentioned in the comment is from the article I linked there

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#79

Post by coldtea »

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…

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

I don't think so. It's medicalization or pathologization of dyslexia that's probably more of a thing in Engish. Same way many issues get medicalized and whole cottage industries and jobs grow around them

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#80

Post by coldtea »

mcswell wrote: post #69
Anon84 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There's a lot more to language learning than being a "sponge". Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before. And the grammar is implicit in what we hear, so children need to extract it in a form that can be generalized to new thoughts and words.

>Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before.

That's downstream of the sponge phase. So much so, that initially we only absorb and don't talk yet.

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