Why is everything these days revolve around ChatGPT(etc). You don't need LLMs to refute Chomsky language models. Modern linguistics pretty much rejected [1] his theories on the basis of evidence.
Thanks for posting, finally some support for his supposed debunking! Interesting reading for sure.
That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions. The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module.
Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things.
These capabilities, coupled with a unique human ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen.
The fact that very smart people think this refutes Chomsky makes me quite sad. They basically restated the UG theory in the last sentence, as proof that it’s wrong…
Chomsky has been saying for literal decades that language is likely a corollary to the basic reasoning skills that set humans apart, but people still think UG means “kids are born knowing what a noun is” :(
I'm reminded of a 400 leve linguistics class I took in undergrad. We had just read Chomsky's Remarks on Nominalization, and one of my classmates remarked, "I don't think this Chomsky guy understands X-Bar theory". The joke being that Chomsky was the major developer of X-Bar theory. We were just reading an early work of his.
This also reminds me of evolution. Some people looked at discoveries in epigenetics and declared that it disproved Darwinian evolution in favor of Lamarckian evolution.
Sure, Darwin's theory of natural selection combined with random variation at the point of reproduction does not explain 100% of evolution, but it is still covers most of it.
Certainly there has been a shift of many applied linguistics researchers away from generative linguistics, but it is still quite common among university linguistics departments and continues to be actively researched (source: took linguistics courses in college a couple of years ago).
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-c...