Lecture 1/Week 1 - Modularity

Lecture 1/Week 1 - Modularity

1. HISTORY

   • BF Skinner/Behaviourialism
     • Science must follow a scientific method/have a hypothesis.
       • Thus Cog psychology is a non-starter because it can't be science
     • Reduced the mind to a BLACK BOX
       • The brain receives input from the senses and produces output from the body
   • NOAM CHOMSKY/UG
     • Noam claimed that behaviourism couldn't explain language
       • Came up with his own UG theory
         • Human language is unique
           • Language aquisition has a critical period
           • Children grow creole languages
           • Linguistic universals
           • POV - Poverty of the stimulus - POS is the thought of linguistics that children are not exposed to the entirety of their own language from a young age and thus are not exposed to the richness of it. This idea proposes contradictory evidence regarding empirical ideas of language only being acquired though experience.
             • What Poverty of the Stimulus does is take the rationale of behaviourism and apply it to language.
               • He says that humans are capable of generating an infinite number of unique and completely novel statements. In order for behaviourism to explain this unlimited behaviour, they would need a stimulus that was similarly unlimited in its input. Chomsky says that is ridiculous and that by the time a child is 3 years old they’re already in this endearing or obnoxious state of talking all the time nonstop and are producing novel utterances but over those years they’ve had a very finite input The stimulus needs to be able to explain the response (according to behaviourist principles). And if Chomsky can demonstrate that the human behaviour with linguistic utterances is unlimited then the input is not enough to explain that. The stimulus is impoverished relative to the response. Behaviourism can’t explain this.
     • Chomsky is wrong,
     • Chomsky says that only humans can learn grammar, and he stated this claim without evidence.
     • Humans must have a unique cognitive tool for acquiring language - UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
       • Chomsky – UG – knowledge about linguistic organisation that people are innately born with that helps us to learn and express things through language.

2. UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

   • Good thing about UG is that it makes testable predictions for us
     • UG is all about evolutionary pressure. When you don’t have an answer, evolution must have made this thing happen.
   • CHOMSKY
     • Languages differ in Surface Structure but share a DEEP structure (nouns and their verbs are usually close together).
       • VSO/SVO - Dutch/English
       • Because there are these supposed rules, that relates back to there being some sort of innate cognitive mechanism in humans causing this – UG.
         • Common thread is universal grammar
           • NIM CHIMPSKY
             • Nim does not follow the rules of Grammar, but that may be because he had a laboratory upbringing. Washoe had more of a humanity to her speech but still no universal grammar. 
             • No one wants to take seriously the claim that an animal can learn grammar. They can learn lots of words and put them together, but grammar is missing, and grammar gives context. It is not just a basic order or object identifying. They generate words but they do not follow the structural principles of human language.  
             • Chimps don't have the same oral cavity as humans and thus researchers teach them through language
             • Behavioural learning is not enough, and this is a good basis for supporting UG. The stimulus response mechanism that animals are endowed with won’t help them replicate human behaviour. You need something uniquely cognitive and uniquely language to achieve that. They do not have the cognition.
   • PINKER
     • LAD/Language Aquisition Device
       • Pinker – the reason why we have a LAD , or something like an UG is because language is really useful, really complex and we can’t explain it with any other basic mechanism.
     • Steve Pinker is really enthusiastic about universal grammar to the point of kind of taking the theory as his own and develops a thing called the Language Activision Device which makes an evolutionary argument for something like UG.
   • Evidence FOR UG/LAD
     • POV
     • Language is uniquely human
     • No other animal has grammar
     • Evolutionary anthropologists took this as a challenge
     • Linguistic universals
     • LA critical period
     • Children grow a new grammar for creole languages
     • Behavioural learning is not enough (See Nim Chimpsky)
     • Chomsky and Pinker say that any sort of universal usage or pattern found across the languages is evidence for UG. The fact that every language has them seems that children seem to be born with this knowledge that they use for learning and that they can pose on the structure to make it learnable.
     • Arguments against UG
       • Continuity problem
         • Children learn language gradually, not all at once as UG would suggest - Tomasello.
           • Once UG clicks we'd expect rapid transition to adult competence (Pinker)
       • Linking problem
         • You can't get there from here
           • All language universals are too general to be helpful. The rest are too abstract or complicated to be helpful (Evans and Levinson).

3. FODOR

   • Universal Grammar is a classic example of a MODULE
     • Modules are dedicated organs or proceses for a very specific task
   • Fodor said UG isn’t enough. For Fodor, UG is a good account of language but we need to be able to explain vision, hearing, memory. Fodor wants us to use the computer metaphor.
   • Fodor’s take on Modularity is to use this metaphor of the computer as an information processor to think about how the brian processes information. This means that you need to identify the individual processes in the brain that are responsible for their own dedicated tasks. Chomksy has identified one big module - language. But Fodor says there are way more modules than that.
     • Fordor wants to say that complex cognition is also explained by dedicated functions localised in some section of the brain. He says that language has UG but that memory might have something similar that follows the same philosophy as the other modualised parts.
     • Fodor's modularity theory maintains that the mind is a set of divisable processes
       • According to Fodor, a module should have these 4 characteristics : Domain specific, Innate, Fast and automatic, Encapsulated
         • A module is an evolutionary pressure to make things happen. Evolved mechanism for this that humans have evolved over time. Kids noticed the spider even though they were tiny and hadn’t been taught to.
     • Working memory model - beautiful example of modularity at work. How the WMM is structured is all about taking your ability to briefly remember and manipulate a small amount of information and is broken down into subtasks.

4. LSA - Latant Semantic Analysis

   • How and where words occur tell us how similar they are in meaning

5. Modularity is impractical and has many shortcomings

6. Arguments against Modularity

   • Tomasello's social cognition hypothesis ----UG doesn't exst and it can't explain language aquision
     • It all comes from social cognition
   • Embodied cognition
     • Language modules cannot explain semantics because of the symbol-grounding problem. Words are grounded - EMBODIED - in experiences

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