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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <1995Jan28.042255.15324@news.media.mit.edu>
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Cc: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca,minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <1995Jan26.224354.401@news.media.mit.edu> <1995Jan27.013805.5038@news.media.mit.edu> <D333tu.7qv@hpl.hp.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 1995 04:22:55 GMT
Lines: 79

In article <D333tu.7qv@hpl.hp.com> curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry) writes:
>: >In article rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>: >
>: >>In spite of the claims of the 'poverty of stimulus' argument, we are
>
>Marvin Minsky (minsky@media.mit.edu) wrote:
>: >Bah.  You cannot assess the "poverty" unless you have an idea of the
>
>: Oops.  I fear my "bah" might be misinterpreted.  It was to be applied to the
>: subject and not, as it might appear, to Rickert's statement, with
>: which I completely agree.
>
>Marvin - since you're lurking here, I'd like to ask you about a
>fascinating point you made in "Society of Mind" (a good book,
>but an obnoxious form factor - it doesn't fit on my bookshelf,

Yes, it was a big mistake.  Because many bookstores have the same
objection.  The French, Italian, Portugese, Dutch, and Japanese
translations are standard size, but the Spanish and German ones are
also too big.  

>so I have to keep lending it out). You hypothesized that the
>alleged shutdown, at puberty, of special language (or at least
>phoneme) learning skills functioned to prevent the parents from
>learning to talk like the baby. I have never seen this
>hypothesis before. Did you think of it yourself,
>or is it propounded at greater length elsewhere (or both)?
>I got the impression that Pinker would disagree, but I'm not
>exactly sure why. Any comments?
>
>Bo

Yes, I've never seen it anywhere else.  

A couple of days ago Andrzej Pindor proposed himself as a
counterexample, and I was gonna reply soon:-----

From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's innate? 
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 1995 18:41:56 GMT

>Marvin Minsky has a whole section in 'The Society of Mind" about it
>and it is one of very few things in his book with which I strongly
>disagree.

>My disagreement come from observing my children and myself. It is true
>that I speak English with a thick accent, but this definitely does not
>come from the fact (as claimed by MM), that (at puberty) I have lost
>some structures in my brain which made it possible for me to
>distingush various accents and produce them. I can very well
>distinguish different English accents and can  even mimic them quite
>well for short periods of time, if I concentrate on it.

Answer 1.  There could be exceptions.  They are not common.
Answer 2.  It does not apply well to people who learned two or more
languages early in life.  This is presumably because of two
linguistic 'facts':

a. There are only (I'm told) around 150 phonemes in all popular languages.
b. A typical language has around 75.

So if, as a child, you learned to distinguish the phonemes of three
languages, then you *can* hearn--and accordingly, learn to use--learn
almost all the phonemes they need.  And, hah, hah, on the remaining
ones, the chances are that the English speakers (who know only about 0.7
languages each) can't discern the remaining differences.

So Andrzej, this suggests that you came from a bi- or tri- lingual
environment.  Refutable?

-m

Another chance to use my favorite sig.

    ___________________________________________
  "Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them."
                                            ---------  Sam Goldwyn
