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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <D3yLs2.62J@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <D38qGn.H6L@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <D3nIwA.5CA@spss.com> <D3r847.EuB@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <D3snLG.IBo@spss.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 22:14:25 GMT
Lines: 64

In article <D3snLG.IBo@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>[I've rearranged some paragraphs]
>
>In article <D3r847.EuB@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>,
>Andrzej Pindor <pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> wrote:
:
>>Of course the copying is only a part of the process, but it provides the
>>material on which learning is build and it seems to me that importance of
>>this input is not sufficiently recognized. 
>
>This is a nice illustration of the importance of one's point of view, I think.
>Linguists and psychologists tend to have the opposite impression: they 
>believe that the usual preconception is that language learning is *just*
>copying what the parents say, and they fight against this preconception.
>
Well, I have seen small children preform quite an elaborate sequence of actions
obviously without any understanding of the purpose of the whole sequence.
Frequency of them doing such things for simpler actions must be much higher
and at the same time is much less noticable.
That linguists and psychologists fight against this preconception is 
understandable, it is in their interest that copying is deemphasised, since 
then their work looks more important :-).

>>As you probably know, children
>>brought up in orphanages from the very early age (as babies) have a lot
>>of developmental problems, for instance they do not speak very well. 
>
>This is no doubt why the experimental psychologist Newt Gingrich wishes
>to do more work in this area.
 
Practical conclusion from the importance of the copying aspect of learning
is that providing children with abundance of examples to copy speeds up
learning. This seems to be borne out by evidence. What are practical
consequences of maintaining that copying is of lesser importance?
On Friday I saw on PBS first installment of the three-part program Human
Language. Chomsky featured prominently there and did push his "poverty of
stimulus" argument even if these exact words were not used. An example
given was a box with a marble inside it and a marble outside. A bunch of kids
(looked like around 5 year olds) were asked which marble can be said to be
"near" the box. Each of them said (of course) that only the marble outside.
Chomsky claimed that this is an indication that knowledge how to properly use
the word "near" must be innate because "children do not have enough exposure to 
such situations to learn it from experience" (or something similar, I do not 
remeber his exact words). With all due respect for Chomsky, I find this    
example misleading. There may be innate structure in the brain which helps
children to grasp a difference between "inside" and "outside" fairly easily,
but I do not think it relates to language. Having grasped this difference
at a certain stage (which would be independent of language) children notice 
that the word "near" is used in context of "outside" as an opposite to "far".
Perhaps linguists and psychologists do not distinguish carefully enough
between learning a language and learning about the world by children. This
things are interrelated but they are not the same. Perhaps studying how
adults learn a new language (preferably very different from the one they know)
would keep these two things separate. From my own experience, the best way
of learning a new  language is by copying the native speakers.


Andrzej

-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
