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points by suddenlybananas 1 day ago | 0 comments
The idea that there is some level of statistical inference involved in language acquisition is not contrary to generative thought, look at Charles Yang's work or Lidz or a fair number of other people. Chomsky just thinks this is uninteresting so he is dismissive of it as a central explanation for language acquisition.
[–] yed 1 day ago
The central question remains whether there are categorical rules built into the brain for grammar (plus "some" statistical inference possibly), or whether the entirety of our grammatical processing is statistical. It is entirely possible that evolution encoded statistical priors into our brains with grammar overall being a fully statistical process. Therefore, the fact that children learn more quickly isn't really hard evidence one way or another.
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