How children pick up a language: Pinker's view (Humans)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 30, 2016, 22:42 (2913 days ago) @ David Turell

Another article with an interview of Steven Pinker:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-chomskys-theory-of-language-wrong-p...

"I asked psychologist Steven Pinker what he thinks about the recent criticism of Chomsky. Pinker has written several acclaimed books on language, notably The Language Instinct (1994) and The Stuff of Thought (2007). In his emailed response, Pinker defends Chomsky, sort of. None of Chomsky’s critics have created a language-acquisition model that entirely dispenses with “innate structure,” Pinker contends.

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"The misconception that Chomsky represents the dominant view comes from the fact that the opposition is divided into many approaches and factions, so there’s no single figure that can be identified with an alternative. Also, he’s famous and charismatic, and people outside the field have heard of him, but haven’t heard of anyone else, and confuse his fame with professional dominance.

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"So for 50 years Chomsky has been a piñata, where anyone who finds some evidence that some aspect of language is learned (and there are plenty), or some grammatical phenomenon varies from language to language, claims to have slain the king. It has not been a scientifically productive debate, unfortunately.

"My own view is that we need to create precise computational models of the language acquisition process – sentences in, grammar out – and see if they succeed in mastering the structure of any language whose sentences are fed into it, in a way that resembles the way children do it. Then whatever is in that model is the best theory of the child’s innate learning abilities. Every now and again someone will try to do that (I did in my first book, Language Learnability and Language Development, in 1984.) Failing that, it’s all too easy to claim that children don’t need any innate priors or assumptions or representations, only to sneak them back in when it comes to get serious and implement a model. That was the trick in a lot of the neural-network models of language that were popular in the 80s and 90s – when the rubber met the road, they always built in innate structure without calling attention to it. That’s what I suspect will be true of models based on the current ideas." –Steven Pinker

"If I may paraphrase: Pinker is saying that Chomsky’s fundamental claim--that language is innate—will endure in one form or another. Chomsky himself recently dismissed criticism of his innate-language theory, telling The New York Times that Tom Wolfe’s attack “hardly rises to the level of meeting a laugh test.'”

Comment: So the question of how children develop language still revolves around an innate mechanism, not yet proven.