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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3fosrd$2if@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3g169u$s8o@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D2xozo.CKH@spss.com> <3g4br6$dga@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 17:32:42 GMT
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In article <3g4br6$dga@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <D2xozo.CKH@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
[snip]
>>>Chomsky explicitly denies that language acquisition can be part of a
>>>general learning facility.  Thus he must be arguing for a completely
>>>new structure built on completely new principles.  
>
>>Again, this doesn't follow.  It might be a new structure built on 
>>old principles; it might be a re-use of an old structure; it might be
>>a relatively simple new system built on top of and exploiting various
>>existing structures.
>
>Once again, there would have to be existing structures capable of
>learning syntax.

Not really; the ability to learn syntax may have been added by the new
or modified structures, even if 90% of the modules used were already there.  

>>c. All natural languages share some grammatical properties; a fact easily
>>explained with UG, but requiring some other explanation without it
>
>These grammatical properties seem well suited to the use of a
>language in human-to-human communication, dealing with the kinds of
>activities humans do.  Alternate grammars that have been suggested to
>not seem as well suited.

This is IMHO the most promising line of attack against UG.  If given
features of UG can be shown to derive from some general constraint(s)
on cognition or communication, Chomsky's case is severely weakened.

>>f. The ability to learn a language fluently virtually disappears around
>>puberty, although general learning skills remain and are even enhanced.
>
>I cannot let you get away with that.  You have already said that
>there is no proof that there is a general learning skill.  Now you
>claim that this possibly non-existent skill has some certain properties.

Perhaps a better way of saying this would have been: If there is such a
thing as a general learning facility, why does it become almost impossible
to learn new languages fluently after puberty, when it's no harder (and
often easier) to learn other things?

>Quite apart from that, I don't see the evidence that general learning
>skill is enhanced.  It seems to be considerably reduced.  There is
>the old saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," which is
>often applied to people.

Someone at puberty is still a pretty young dog.  

Learning often makes further learning easier, both because one has a larger
knowledge base to build on, and because one has acquired a better set of 
methods for learning.  My wife, for instance, is a better student now, in
her thirties, than she was in her twenties.  

If general learning skills were indeed considerably reduced, one would 
expect picking up new languages to become harder and harder.  But in many
people's experience (including mine) they get easier, after the second.

>>>But the poverty of stimulus argument can be turned upside down.  If
>>>the child, with a process of trial and error testing, cannot find the
>>>grammar, then evolution, also using trial and error testing, cannot
>>>find it either.  Given the slowness of evolution, and the relatively
>>>short time in which homo sapiens evolved from other apes, the number
>>>of trial-and-error tests that could have been performed by evolution
>>>is smaller than the number of trial-and-error tests that a child can
>>>perform during the period of language acquisition.
>
>>The tasks are not comparable.  Consider the class of grammars as powerful
>>as that of a natural language.  To oversimplify drastically, the child 
>>has to determine which of these possible grammars is actually in use;
>>evolution need only pick one randomly.
>
>Ah, yes.  The "... and then a miracle happened" argument.  This seems
>to be consistent my earlier rhetoric about creationism.

What's the miracle?  
