That's not true, the Moro experiments show they use different capacities as do similar experiments on people who have certain severe cognitive deficiencies that don't impact language processing (e.g. the subject "Chris")
My argument is that “thinking” and “language processing” are not two sequential or clearly separated modes in the brain but deeply intertwined.
Language is a lot more than parsing syntax, whatever your thoughts are on the matter, even LLMs are clearly doing more than that. Are there any experiments where subjects had severe cognitive deficiencies and language in its full breadth or maybe i should say communication ? came out unscathed ?
The chris experiments don't seem to go into much detail in that front.
I just gave one: "Chris". Here's Chomsky describing the "Chris"-experiments ([1]) as part of a broader answer about how language is distinct from general cognition which I paraphrased above.
> That doesn't contradict the argument that “thinking” and “language processing” are not two sequential or clearly separated modes in the brain but deeply intertwined.
It's not an argument, it's an assertion, that is, in fact, contradicted by the experimental evidence I described (Moro and "Chris"). Of course they are "deeply intertwined" but because of the evidence it's probably an interface between two distinctive systems rather than one general system doing two tasks.
Like i said, these experiments stop at a vague 'Chris can still learn languages'. No comment on actual proficiency or testing. For all i know i can't have a meaningful conversation with this guy beyond syntactically correct speech. Or maybe the best proficiency he's ever managed is still pretty poor compared to the average human. I have no idea.
There's no contradiction because i never argued/asserted the brain didn't have parts tuned for language, which is really all this experiment demonstrates.
It's irrelevant to the experiment: he could learn synthetic language with human-like grammar and could not learn synthetic languages with non-human-like grammar. Regular people could solve the non-human-like languages with difficulty. Because his language ability is much higher than his general problem solving ability it gives strong evidence that 1. human language capacity a special function, not a general purpose cognitive function and 2. it obeys a certain structure.
> There's no contradiction because i never argued/asserted the brain didn't have centers tuned for language, which is really all this experiment demonstrates.
>Because his language ability is much higher than his general problem solving ability
I don't see how you can say his language ability is much higher than his general problem solving ability if you don't know what proficiency of language he is capable of reaching.
When you are learning say English as a second language, there are proficiency tiers you get assigned when you get tested - A1, A2 etc
If he's learning all these languages but maxing out at A2 then his language ability is only slightly better than his general problem solving ability.
This is the point i'm trying to drive home. Maybe it's because i've been learning a second language for a couple years and so i see it more clearly but saying 'he learned x language' says absolutely nothing. People say that to mean anything from 'well he can ask for the toilet' to 'could be mistaken for a native'.
>I don't know what you are trying to say then.
The brain has over millions of years been tuned to speak languages with certain structures. Deviating from these structures is more taxing for the brain. True statement. But how on earth does that imply the brain isn't 'thinking' for the structures it is used to ? Do you say you did not think for question 1 just because question 2 was more difficult ?
As I said it's not relevant but if you wanted to know you could put in the bare minimum of effort into doing your own research. From Smith and Tsimpli's "The Mind of a Savant": "On the [Gapadol Reading Comprehension Test] Christopher scored at the maximum level, indicating a reading comprehension of 16 years and 10 months". They describe the results of a bunch of other language tests, where he scores average to above average, including his translations of passages from a dozen different languages.
> But how on earth does that imply the brain isn't 'thinking' for the structures it is used to ? Do you say you did not think for question 1 just because question 2 was more difficult ?
The point isn't to define the word "thinking" it is to show that the language capacity is a distinct faculty from other cognitive capacities.
