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Psycholinguistic theory has traditionally pointed to the importance of explicit symbol manipulation in humans, to explain our unique facility for symbolic forms of intelligence such as language and mathematics. A recent report utilizing intracranial recordings in a cohort of three participants argues that language areas in the human brain rely on a continuous vectorial embedding…
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A three hour break-down of a paper published in Journal of Neurolinguistics, providing some background and context, reviewing the paper section-by-section. Paper link Video link A comprehensive neural model of language must accommodate four components: representations, operations, structures and encoding. Recent intracranial research has begun to map out the feature space associated with syntactic processes,…
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After having a recent conversation with Steven Piantadosi on large language models, I wanted to briefly comment here on some of the themes in our discussion, before turning to additional critiques that we did not have enough time to talk about. When we discussed impossible vs. possible language, Steven seemed to confuse languages with the…
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In a new study to be published in next week’s issue of PNAS, Yuan Yang and Steven Piantadosi’s paper, “One model for the learning of language,” attempts to show that language acquisition is possible without recourse to “innate knowledge of the structures that occur in natural language.” The authors claim that a domain-general, rule-learning algorithm can “acquire…
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A recent talk I gave at UCD School of Medicine: “Why Everything You Know About Language is Wrong”.
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A recent video from the Active Inference GuestStream, presenting a pre-print with Emma Holmes and Karl Friston and discussing the nature of language and computation.
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Joint work with Evelina Leivada is now out in Ampersand. We discuss 10 ambiguous, misused or polysemous terms in linguistics, including I-/E-language, entrainment, reference, ‘the neural basis of X’, (un)grammaticality, third factor, and labeling.
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Science today published a new study on early Homo braincase shape, with some commentary from me included. The full paper is here.
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Elliot Murphy 