Take That, Chomsky! Birds can learn grammar!
2 comments "But Hauser said it still doesn't quite disprove a key paper he wrote in 2002 with Chomsky. The starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about."
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"First, we're asked to evaluate the claim that a creature does or doesn't have the ability to process types of sequences (conceptually) requiring an unbounded number of states, on the basis of experiments that deal with a small number of short sequences. Any competent computer science undergraduate can set up a finite automaton that can process the sequences used in these papers; and if she's taken a machine learning course, she should be able to set up several sorts of models that can learn the distinctions in question, without being able to deal with general context-free or "embedding" languages at all. [...]
And second, if we make a serious attempt to investigate what it would be like to have the ability to process general context-free languages, even in the case of fairly short strings, we will quickly find that humans fail the test, at least if we approach the problem in the way that Fitch, Hauser, Genter et al. have done."
--Mark Liberman's Language Log response
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