Hacker News Reader

Original researcher here. For context, people are not arguing that nothing is learned, but instead that children come innately prepared with abstract categories of "noun" and "determiner" even if they don't know which words are nouns or determiners or even exactly how these categories are combined.

Here's a paper that makes this argument: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/PNAS-2013-final.pdf

View on HN

Hey, Michael. Thanks for posting. This is a more understandable claim than the one I read from Stanford News. That was I guess a misunderstanding on my part.

I'll take a look at the paper you linked, but I'm also curious, how does your technique make a distinction between rule-based grammar being fully learned vs mostly or partially learned? That is, how can you say that improved grammar over time is evidence against innate ability to understand/use grammar? It seems we have an innate ability to walk in that we seem to be "wired for it", but we are still terrible at it for a bit over a year on average. The fact that we get noticeably better over time doesn't seem to rule out innate ability. This of course assumes "innate ability" doesn't mean "completely unlearned".

Sorry for the slow response. Our model is - we think - an advance because it actually allows us to infer the amount of shared structure between different words. This is an index of how much generalization the child is doing. If they do no generalization, that's evidence for what's called "item specific learning" (no abstract grammatical rules). If they do complete generalization, that's the innateness hypothesis in the paper I linked. What we found was - of course - a mixture, but critically with something close to item-based learning in the very earliest data from the very youngest kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com