Computers and Language Acquisition

[Francis Hult]

Haaretz.com

 

Whiz Kids / Computer grammar

 

Are babies born with innate linguistic knowledge? This question has interested linguists for 50 years, since Noam Chomsky published his book "Syntactic Structures," in which he argued that all children possess intuitive linguistic knowledge. Jonathan Berant, a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University, is part of a growing group of researchers who are trying to refute Chomsky's theory in favor of a different concept of language acquisition. To that end, he is trying to teach languages to computers. Chomsky claimed that human beings possess hereditary linguistic knowledge, but other scientists maintain that language has no special status and is not an autonomous mechanism, Berant explains. "We are trying to prove that language is constructed from the same mechanisms that are related to other conceptual abilities, such as the ability to identify patterns and distinguish between wheat and chaff."

 

Full story:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/939084.html

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