Almost all of the points we disagree on could form the basis for
a very long extended discussion which would not likely reach a mutually
satisfactory conclusion. There are two issues that are worth
pursuing, but only one is central to the hypothesis that I asserted that started
this thread. The core issue is whether, in the early years, people
develop a common ontology (obviously, not a formal one) and an associated
vocabulary that is so close among individuals that it allows highly accurate
communication **when restricted to the most basic concepts**. That set of
commonly understood concepts is what I consider the brain’s equivalent of
a “conceptual defining vocabulary”, a formal foundation ontology that
has an inventory of representations of basic concepts that will allow logical specifications
of almost all specialized terms one might want to represent. You
say that I have no evidence. I say that the fact that we can communicate
accurately when we try to is very good evidence that we have an adequate
vocabulary of words with agreed meanings. You say that psycholinguistic
research has already disproven the notion that children can learn to
communicate with a common vocabulary by the experience of seeing words used in
context to refer to objects and events. Fine, that would be useful
information. So, educate us and provide us with the references to that
research which you are convinced shows otherwise. Online references if
possible. And on-point, please, no list of general tomes on language
learning.
To be more specific:
[[[3]]] [PH] >> HOW? How is it possible for two
children in kindergarten to align their mental ontologies? The idea doesn't
even make sense: it would require them to be telepathic.
[pc] No, no telepathy needed. They
need only both hear a word used in reference to the same objects or
events.
[PH] There is no evidence, psychological or computational,
that such mere associating of word sounds with objects is enough to learn language
from. How would one get from this the meaning of a word like
'embarrassing'? You are just not talking about anything remotely real
here.
. . . and later:
[PH] I have no idea how they do it [learn language]. If I
did, I would be famous in psycholinguistics. But I do know a fairly long
history of failure of simplistic ideas about how it is done, of which the one
you describe is one of the first, and all of which have been shown to be wrong
or inadequate. The most trenchant observation about yours is that neither kids
nor adults actually speak in the object/word way that would be necessary for
this to work.
I am not sure what you are referring to here as being “wrong”
or disproven. I did not say that children learn *only* by pointing
to objects, but by hearing a word used in reference to objects and
events. When a person does something obviously stupid and says “That
was dumb. I am so embarrassed” one can start right away to grasp
the meaning of “embarrassed”, if one knows the other words.
Subsequent references to that event and others as “embarrassing”
add to the detail of understanding. And of course people use grammatical
cues, and use words already learned to grasp the meaning of new words.
None of this is a theory of language acquisition, but it is a description of
how people can acquire the *same* meanings for the same words by seeing
them used consistently in such contexts. Common experience of seeing
language used to describe images may also be part of the process these
days. The only point here is that there are a sufficiently large set of *common*
experiences associated with language use to support the development of an
adequate common defining vocabulary and associated mental objects. Whatever
the full process of language learning is, the reason we can communicate is that
the full set of experiences of use of words allows most native speakers to
induce the same common meaning. If this is insufficient to explain how we
can acquire a vocabulary in common with those we speak to, please do refer us
to the papers that explain what part of this process description is wrong and
disproven. Is it “inadequate”? – of course. At
no point did I suggest that the set of language acquisition methods I referred to
in one sentence is complete.
The interesting second issue is, why do people building ontologies
disagree on how to represent certain concepts. That is somewhat related,
but really a separate issue which should be pursued in a different
thread. Later.
PatC
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx