The article starts getting good in the last 2 paragraphs, explaining the actual science of observed transitional probabilities, then it suddenly stops.
Its almost as if the writer ran out of coffee, or his scientific mind went on strike. What was that ?
> For this the infants were presented with words and non-words and found to have longer listening time for the nonwords. This indicated they had already become familiar with the words by listening to the continuous sequence of syllables within which they had been embedded. The only way that could have happened was by monitoring the TPs between syllables—the infants were capable of statistical learning.
First, "longer listening time" doesn't mean that they identified syllables. Second, it's a group effect, not individual, and the differences are small. It's NHST, and thus their p < 0.04 and p < 0.03 means very little. Third, two minutes of speech shouldn't be able to affect the underlying speech recognition. It's too fast. If someone talks some unknown language to you for two minutes, you still don't have a clue. Fourth, the task was extremely artificial.
This is a common pattern in cognitive psychology. Small effects, artificial tasks, ignoring other explanations, and then making a grand claim. I'm not denying that the babies, as a group, may have reacted differently to strings of phonenemes not in the training data, but I do deny that this is sufficient evidence for anything.
Yeh, but it came as a surprise so it must be true.
Besides, I get this strong vibe that there is a substantial faction in linguistics that is hell-bent on proving that infants learn language statistically, which I think has everything to do with "proving Chomsky wrong" (note the bit in the article about dismissing arguments for universal grammar in chapter 3 of the advertised book). I reckon that has to do with Chomsky's style of arguing that can rub people the very wrong way and seems to have. Depending on whom you ask, either Chomsky has been comprehensively debunked and nobody in linguistics listens to him any more (that's the statistical learning people) or, well, he hasn't and his theories are still valid (his friends). In any case, all this partisanship can only hurt anyone who really wants to get to the bottom of things and understand how language works.
And the recent grandiose claims from AI researchers are certainly not helping, either.
The Chomskyan idea that has been "debunked" or at least has little credibility as a theory of language, is his syntax models. Syntactic Structures was a formidable influence on linguistics, but it (and the models that follow from it) do not connect well to the way "the brain" processes language. One of the underlying ideas behind Universal Grammar, namely that parts of language acquisition and processing have a biological base, is not debunked.
That both Chomsky and AI proponents can rub people the wrong way, doesn't help the debate, indeed.
>> One of the underlying ideas behind Universal Grammar, namely that parts of language acquisition and processing have a biological base, is not debunked.
That's my understanding also but in discussions I've followed that was the main sticking point rather than the specific form of this "language endowment" as I've heard Chomsky call it. E.g. see Alex Clark's "Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus":
This was recommended to me by my MSc thesis advisor who I believe felt I was a little too eager to accept Chomsky's arguments for linguistic nativism. I should read it again, it went over my head at the time.
Its almost as if the writer ran out of coffee, or his scientific mind went on strike. What was that ?