From my very limited knowledge of language acquisition, my guess is you might be wrong (although I'm happy to be corrected). Don't human children acquire language much faster, more accurately and from poorer signals than would be possible via statistical inference?

I could be - I'm no expert on this either. My understanding of academic linguistics is that there are two main schools of thought: on one side you have Noam Chomsky as the most famous exponent, saying that all languages have a sort of universal grammar that somehow reflects our brain structure, and on the other the behaviorism of BF Skinner, that languages are largely arbitrary, syntactic processing is learned behavior, and complexity is both a result of and a selector for intelligence as an evolutionary trait.

I don't have a really strong opinion, though I lean a bit towards the behaviorist approach. There have been some suggestions from ethnomusicologists that small children everywhere sing the same sort of melody on the same scale, which inclined me to the opposite view for a while, but I think that was more of a theory than a finding and still needs evidence.

I must say I quite disagree too. I know a thing or two about Computational Linguistics and Statistical Inference is really a small potion of the corpus of work there. But the tool is funny and maybe useful nonetheless. Far from baked in my opinion though...

Agree partially. Statistical inference is at the heart of language acquisition but language processing is far more complex. Semantics always existed though. Long before we built computers, and long before we found out that computer programs and the hardware running them were somewhat limited in their ability to process language as fast and cleverly as our brains do. I look forward to the day this happens. In the meantime, I believe that the very nonsense that this nifty scribe puts out reminds us of how limited the automation of language still is.