April 18 – Jerry Feldman: "The Opulence of the Substrate: Embodiment Explains How Children Learn Grammar"

For a variety of reasons, grammar learning has become a touchstone for some of the most basic questions about the mind. The "Poverty of the Stimulus" argument claims that language (particularly grammar) must be innate, because children learn their native language(s) from sparse samples and are not explicitly corrected.  There is a long tradition of refuting this argument and we have known for decades that development involves the continual interplay of genetic and environmental factors.

Embodiment provides an alternative and much more plausible narrative on how children learn grammar.  The NTL project at ICSI/UCB has been working for two decades to investigate the details of an explicitly neural theory of language, implement computational models and apply the ideas on a range of tasks. One outcome has been the suggestion of a Unified Cognitive Science as the best way of investigating deep questions about the mind and, by extension, social communication.