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.