Children learn language much faster than it seems possible for a "blank" neural network to learn. It seems that there is some "circuitry" hard-wired into the human brain that helps learning language. So the question is: can a computer learn language as well as a human, without simply hard-coding language into it?

This is a popular summary of Chomsky's thesis that was put down decades ago, when cognitive psychology was at its infancy. Now we know a lot more on how babies learn the world and language (do a Google search on "infant statistical learning") and most evidence points to the fact that they employ algorithms that are mainly statistical in nature for learning.

"Children learn language much faster than it seems possible for a "blank" neural network to learn." This is a very strong statement that has no mathematical or computational proof AFAIK. It had no proof when Chomksy first put down that thesis either, it was an axiom of his. BTW, belief in a specialized language faculty was not universal, even in the past, esp. some philosophers of language disagreed with this view.

It follows logically from these 3 premises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus#Summar... Those premises could be wrong but it's not just an axiom.

#2 is simply wrong. Children are corrected when their grammar is off so they do get to see incorrect sentence structure. It's questionable if children could learn language from only watching TV, but that's not the standard learning environment.

PS: I am far from the first person to point that out. At this point they are treating it as an axiom because they continue to believe it despite the disproof of their premises.

Yet, they consistently ignore this input. This has also been pointed out dozens and dozens of times.

Children are definitely not a 'blank' neural network. They spend ~6 months staring off into nowhere, looking, listening, and slowly developing the skills to respond to their environment.

A newborn baby will recoil away from a dark circle growing larger on a screen. Where did he learn to associate a growing share with an object approaching near enough to collide?

We have certain built in behaviors and reflexes.

This strikes me as the old nature vs. nurture debate - trying to determine which human behaviors are hard wired and which are learned. Like most complex questions I don't think there is a single right answer, but my current theory is that humans have more hard wired behavior than most people like to admit. It is precisely because of our language skills that we can rationalize behavior that has it's root cause in the more animal regions of the brain.

To put it another way - most people think they are rational. Most people act irrationally. To me it is animal instinct that is cause of greed, war, social hierarchy, etc. and it is so ingrained in society that we don't question it's root cause which most likely boils down to atavistic tendencies.

To me this fall in the reptilian reflexes box. Accelerating signal related to increasing proximity => act.

By "blank" of course I mean that they begin blank and immediately start learning from their environment. You say they develop skills "slowly" but it's still much faster than you would expect, unless children have some innate skill at language built in instead of being "blank."

Edit: sorry if this is vague, this is what I'm talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_nativism

You are being way too vague. What is setting your expectations of "slowly"? What rate would you expect children to learn language at? Even if that were to be the case, your argument is essentially a god of the gaps argument. Not P therefor Q is not sound reasoning.

The whole notion of the Universal Grammar and innate language faculties which instantiate subsets of the Universal Grammar is weird.

No, he's right, check out Pinkers the language instinct for the full treatment on the issue. Children learn at a rate impossible from just what they hear and imitate. We are pre-wired for language.

30,000+ hours using more computing power than the fastest computer on the planet to get the a 3 year olds grasp of language is hardly 'fast'.

PS: Language acquisition starts before birth, and continues 24/7 after that until we 'learn' it.

"Pinker explains that a universal grammar represents specific structures in the human brain that recognize the general rules of other humans' speech, such as whether the local language places adjectives before or after nouns, and begin a specialized and very rapid learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or pure logic. This learning machinery exists only during a specific critical period of childhood and is then disassembled for thrift, freeing resources in an energy-hungry brain."

Having read the book, his arguments are far more convincing than your assertions.

However, unlike his arguments I limited myself to using actual facts.

If you just want a compelling argument: Biology is a vary important component in the creation and evolution of language, because the fine motor control required to say "linguistic" vs "mommy" or "stop" has a lot to do with how languages are learned and evolve. As baby's practice how to say thing babble converts to simple words but in doing so there are pattern as to which sounds are easier to produce and therefore enable them to probe their environment by reproducing. This paralls the evolution of language where the most important and simplist ideas where the first to be communicated and therefore take up the 'root' address space in the language with more complex words and ideas like 'chemist' being tacked on over time.

PS: Sure, it sounds great. But how many assumptions am I stringing together in just those few sentences.

Look, if you haven't read the book, I'm not interested in your opinions of his arguments; you don't know them. When someone recommends a book, you don't kill the messenger when your disagreement is with the author; don't be an ass.

I have read most of the language instinct. I get why people find it compelling, but that has little to do with being accurate. My point was his style tends to be convincing vs. his actual evidence being compelling.

PS: Think of it like this A -> B, B -> C therefore A -> C is all well in good most of the time. A -> B .... Y -> Z therefore A -> Z only really works with math, build a chain that long and it's unlikely for all those steps to be accurate.

And I don't find your point in the least bit compelling. Unless you're a leading expert in the field as he is, your points mean jack squat to me. And since I'm not making the argument, it's not argument from authority to say his book is far more convincing than your assertions without evidence. You're trying to debate me about a book I recommended; you're an ass. Goodbye.

That seems overly rude. It's also a ridiculous appeal to authority at the same time.

If I where to attack the book I could say something like: "In chapter 2 'Chatterboxes' he states humans are the only animal that uses language which is complex issue by it's self. He goes further and says every group of humans in remote areas we encountered have had complex language. He then runs with that line of reasoning. However this ignores not just other animals that use simple forms of language but human ancestors that where close to us anatomically and probably also used language. If homo sapiens's ancestors also used language then you would expect the earliest humans to also use language therefore language would spread from it's origins to all those remote areas vs. being created from scratch in those remote areas."

Now, I could get 10 PHD's to say the same thing and use quotes etc, but what's important is the accuracy of the statement not who says it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jl/what_is_evidence/

Are you mentally handicapped, what part of "Goodbye" was unclear to you? And no, it's not an argument from authority, I specifically headed off that critique when I said I wasn't making any fucking argument. Learn to read.

Saying you found his argument convincing is in no way important either it's a factual statement it it's not, what you believe is meaningless. Suggesting it matters in any way who made the argument is an appeal to authority even if your next sentience says it's not. Reality does not care what you think it just is.

PS: You clearly lack the courage of your convictions to actually leave an argument when you say 'Goodbye'. However, I realize trying to reason with a fool is a waste of time, so best of luck and 'Goodbye'.

PS: Fuck you, I wasn't even talking to you, I recommended a book to someone. You lack the brains to know when someone isn't interested a debate, because you're an ass.

PS: You're still an ass, and you don't know what appeal to authority means. We have to be debating and me relying on him to make a point for it to be an appeal to authority. As I clearly indicated I wasn't interested in debating the subject, you can't accuse me of logical fallacies, a point I made previously but you failed to grok because you're an ass.

I'm not sure what you mean by "faster," (what are you comparing to exactly?), but I think something that speeds up human learning considerably as compared to computers is feedback. Children don't just blankly sit there taking in information and then "fitting it" to a model-- they perform actions and observe the consequences; it is empirical. The embodied action-perception loop is fundamental to how real-world learning works. A closer computer model is reinforcement learning, for example, which does exactly this, it wraps a neural network in an action-perception loop an uses online training to learn the reward function. The problem is of course that the reward function can be very hard to design except for fairly simple tasks.