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Comment by pazimzadeh | Hacker News Reader

> Their results showed that the subjects’ brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time.

How are they distinguishing between grammar that's encoded in the brain due to "nature" vs grammar that's encoded in the brain via "nurture"? I think we all knew that the brain has some mechanism to detect grammar.

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Your assumption is that all information necessary and sufficient to decode grammar into its constituents is detectable from the spoken words that a child hears. According to Chomsky there is a distinction between the I-Language versus E-Language [1] (internal/ex) namely because grammar in most human languages is not the most computationally efficient way of structuring sentences hence the need for an uniquely human/innate ability [2].

This is also why monkeys can never be trained to learn human language [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar#.22I-...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

I don't think any assumption was made here. It is as much an assumption to say that all information necessary and sufficient to decode grammar into its constituents is not detectable from spoken words that a child is exposed to. That's a theoretical argument. Just because we can't think of a way this could be done, doesn't mean it can't be done. At the moment, we simply don't know.

I think what the comment you're responding to meant is that this study shows no evidence for an innate internal language or grammar, which I thought was Chomsky's most controversial claim.

>grammar in most human languages is not the most computationally efficient way of structuring sentences

Grammar in most human languages is structured to be information-theoretically efficient, which often winds up being vague, ambiguous, and context-dependent. It's basically a time-space trade-off for statistical inference.

> How are they distinguishing between grammar that's encoded in the brain due to "nature" vs grammar that's encoded in the brain via "nurture"?

They do not.

> I think we all knew that the brain has some mechanism to detect grammar.

The press release is spinning the paper to make it sound much more controversial than it is.

Pattern detection. Pattern happens to be grammar.

However, patterns are language dependent. They don't mention what happened when an English only speaker heard a Chinese phrase.

If you hear long enough of something that is noise first time you hear it, eventually you will distinguish patterns if it is for example Chinese. Brain is pattern recognition machine.

wait, i think that's a good comment. what if that "invisible grammar" they said was the result of the statistical process ? which means that it already emerges in childhood?

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