Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

I recommend the book “Why Only Us?” by Chomsky and Berwick on this topic. It gets quite technical in places but I still got quite a lot of out it.

View on HN

If you’re interested in this topic then you should definitely know the Chomsky/Berwick position, but it’s not the only view and has never been the consensus. For an alternative argument, “The Origin of Human Communication” by Michael Tomasello is good.

Can someone recommend good reading on the "psychology of languages", i.e., how does a language develop in the brain; why is it easy for me (as someone who grew up in the East) to learn guttural sounds of Arabic, but it's nearly impossible for my kids raised in the West? Similarly, I could never hope to speak clicking sounds of Southern African languages. Does the writing system affect speech, and if yes, then how? Like for example, in some Central Asian countries the alphabet changed multiple times within a century - from Arabic-based script, to Latin, then Cyrillic, then Latin again. What are some known neuroscientific tricks (for adults, not kids) for acquiring specific languages?

I asked an LLM the same questions, and that's what I got:

Here are some key resources on language psychology and acquisition:

1. "Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics" by Julie Sedivy - Covers basic concepts and neural basis of language

2. "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker - Classic work on language acquisition and development

3. "Foundations of Bilingual Memory" by Heredia & Altarriba - Explains why early exposure shapes sound perception abilities

Writing system changes mainly affect literacy, less so speech. The brain processes spoken and written language somewhat separately.

For deeper research, look up "phonological acquisition" and "critical period hypothesis" in scientific journals.

Would appreciate human input on these topics as well. Thanks.

#1 is a textbook that I've taught out of. It's a good summary of decently up-to-date psycholinguistics.

#2 is more of a polemical book, maybe not the best if you want a fair summary.

#3 I've never heard of.

> how does a language develop in the brain

Huge question, but there's not really a lot of data to go on. There do seem to be some things that are a lot easier to learn when you are very young.

> why is it easy for me (as someone who grew up in the East) to learn guttural sounds of Arabic

It all has to do with the speech sounds you're exposed to when you're young.

> Does the writing system affect speech, and if yes, then how?

Probably not. Very little if so. The main effect would be preserving old speech forms of the language to some extent, if the writing is phonetically based.

> What are some known neuroscientific tricks (for adults, not kids) for acquiring specific languages?

The most important thing is lots of exposure and practice and also the way you're practicing the language should be as close as possible to how you will actually use the language. There aren't any massively effective shortcuts.

The recommendations in other replies to your post look good.

If you grew up hearing certain sounds, it will usually be easy for you to hear and produce those sounds, whether it's the sounds of Arabic, click languages, or English (as native speakers of Chinese or Japanese know wrt the sounds made by 'l' and 'r'). Infants hear all the distinctions, but they tend to lose the ability as their brain learns their first language (or first and second in bilingual homes). To some extent you can, however, pick up the distinctions up to around puberty. And adults who have studied phonetics (all the sounds used by all the languages of the world) can generally learn to hear and produce those as well.

Writing systems generally do not change the spoken language, as evidenced by the way English is written, which bears only some relationship to the spoken language (and often only to the way English was spoken hundreds of years ago).

In order to to learn another language, linguists study phonetics (as mentioned above), as well as phonology, morphology, syntax etc. I can say from experience that these help. I don't think I'd call these subjects "neuroscientific", just linguistic.

Chomsky has that wrong theory about language innateness. In reality languages that don't fit child brains don't survive. It's the other way around!

Not sure why you think that would prove Chomsky wrong. First, languages that don't fit brains (children's or otherwise) aren't going to be spoken by humans in the first place. And second, languages that fit our brains--all 7000 of them spoken (or signed) today, as well as those that are now extinct--don't fit chimpanzees' brains. So there's something about our brains that makes it possible for us to learn language(s).

Are Chomsky's ideas on language still taken seriously these days?

Why not? Do you think they are somehow refuted?

https://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Ah, thanks. Makes sense. norvig's opinions would be highly regarded here, and the existence of LLMs implies strong evidence to the contrary.

Yes, Chomsky's earlier positions include the idea that recursive natural grammars cannot be learnt by machines because of the "poverty of the stimulus." But this result is only true if you ignore probabilistic grammars. (See the Norvig article for some footnotes linking to the relevant papers.)

And of course, LLMs generate perfectly reasonable natural language without any "universal grammar", or indeed, much structure beyond "predict the next token using a lot of transformer layers."

I'm pretty sure that most of Chomsky's theoretical model is dead at this point, but that's a long discussion and he's unlikely to agree.

Chomsky had a stroke awhile back, which apparently left him unable to speak. But I guarantee that there are many linguists who would not agree that his model is dead.

As for LLMs, at present they require orders of magnitude more training data than children are exposed to, so it's unclear they have anything to say about how humans learn language.

That looks like a disagreement with him on the utility of machine learning; while I don’t know whether Chomsky is right about his more fundamental ideas on linguistics, that doesn’t seem relevant.

Yes, although there are other theories. Some of those other theories actually retain some of Chomsky's ideas, such as our innate capability to learn language (which seems to be the idea most commonly disagreed with). Two examples are Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).

Why would that idea be disagreed with? Even if language learning started out piggybacking on some general mechanism, that general mechanism would have biases, and evolution would, I think, tend to optimize/specialize it over time.

I can't really speak for why it is disagreed with--I personally find the claim that language is innate completely convincing. But one reason I've heard for disagreeing is the notion that some animals have language (not true unless you water down the definition of "language"). Others seem to think that general learning mechanisms explain the acquisition of language. I find that outrageously naive, since virtually all children acquire language (and if they're raised bilingually, more than one language), whereas even good linguists struggle to define all the rules of a language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com