YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Gibson

lines on the record: 228
first: 2024-04-17
most recent: 2024-04-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Brazilian government. There's some corrupt people there. It was very difficult to go back in there. And so I was like, all right, I got to find another group. And so we searched around and we were able to find the because I wanted to keep working on this kind of problem. And so we found the Chimani and just go there. I didn't really have, we didn't have content. We had a little bit of contact and brought someone. And that was, you know, we just kind of just try things. I say it's like a lot of that's just like ambition, just try to do something that other people haven't done. Just give it a shot is what I mean, I do that all the time.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you see something interesting, just go and do it. I do that. That's something I do, which is kind of unusual for most people. So when I saw the Pierhoh was available to go and visit, I was like, yes, yes, I'll go. And then when we couldn't go back, we had some trouble with the...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which these are really very different people from you. And he's very social. And so I think that's a big part of this is like, that's how a lot of people know a lot of languages that they're willing to talk to other people.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the most basic things to figure out. Yeah, you start that. You actually start with objects. And just say, you know, just throw a stick down and say stick. And then you say, What do you call this? And stay do this a few times. And then they'll say the word whatever. And he says a standard thing to do is to throw two sticks at two sticks. And then, you know, he learned pretty quick that there weren't any count words in this language because they didn't know this wasn't interesting. I mean, it was kind of weird. They'd say some or something, the same word over and over again. And so, but that is a standard thing. You just try to, but you have to be pretty out there socially, like willing to talk to random people.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would want Dan Everett with me. He is like amazing at learning foreign languages. And so this is an amazing feat, right? To be able to go, this is a language Peter Haub, which has no translators before him. I mean, there were missionary went there. Well, there was a guy that had been there before, but he wasn't very good And so he learned the language far better than anyone else had learned before him. He's like good at. He's a very social person. I think that's a big part of it being able to interact. So I don't know, it kind of depends on this species from outer space, how much they want to talk to us.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're probably talking to other trees, right? They're not talking to us. And so to the extent they're talking, they're saying something interesting to some other, you know. Know kind specific as opposed to us, right And so there probably is, there may be some signal there. So there are people out there, actually it's pretty common to say that human language is special and different from any other animal communication system. And I just don't think the evidence is there for that claim. I think it's not obvious. You know, we just don't know what because we don't speak these other communication systems until we get better, you know, I do think there are people working on that, as you pointed out, though people working on whale speak, for instance, like that's really fascinating.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think some of them are not going to have much interesting to say. We don't know. We certainly don't know.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we don't know what those other, we just don't know, we can't talk to them yet. And so there probably is a signal in there, and it might very well be something complicated like human language. I mean, sure, with a small brain in lower species, there's probably not a very good communication system, but in these higher species where you have what seems to be abilities to communicate something, there might very well be a lot more signal there than we're otherwise thought.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's bad reasoning. Like, you know, I'm pretty sure if you asked a whale what we're saying, they'd say, well, I'm making a bunch of weird noises. And so it's like, this is a very odd reasoning to be making that human language is special because we're the only ones who have human language.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say yes. I think it's not crazy at all. I think it's quite reasonable. There's this sort of weird view, I think, that to think that human language is somehow special. I mean, Maybe it is. We can certainly do more than any of the other species. And maybe our language system is. Part of that, it's possible. But people have often talked about how human, like Chomsky, in fact, has talked about how human language has this compositionality thing that he thinks is sort of key in language. The problem with that argument is he doesn't speak whale and he doesn't speak crow and he doesn't speak monkey you know he's like they say things like well they're making a bunch of grunts and squeaks and that the reasoning is like”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't have to, right? You can't have a long, long sentence with a bunch of local words, but it's much more likely to have the possibility of long dependencies with long sentences.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I'm optimistic that we could get measures of those things. And so maybe that's translatable. I don't know. I don't know, though. I have not worked on that”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so you were talking earlier about translation and about how translations there's good and bad translations. I mean, now we're talking about translations of form, right? So what makes writing good, right? There's music to form, right? It's not just the content. It's how it's written. And translating that, that sounds difficult. We should”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty bad in number. It's like extreme, I'd say, in the number space, you know, exact number space. But in the color dimension, right? So that's not so bad. But it's a problem that you don't have ways to talk about. The concepts, and”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's going to be cases where it's going to be really hard, right? So there are concepts that are in one language and not another, like the most extreme kinds of cases are these cases of number information. So good luck translating a lot of English into Piraha. It's just impossible. There's no way to do it because there are no words for these concepts that we're talking about. There's probably the flip side, right? There's probably stuff in Piraha which is going to be hard to translate into English on the other side. And so I just don't know what those concepts are. I mean, you know, the space, the world space is a little, is different from my world space. And so I don't know what, like, so that the things they talk about, things are, you know, it's going to have to do with their life as opposed to, you know, my industrial life, which is going to be different. And so there's going to be problems like that always. You know, there's like, it's not maybe it's not so bad in the case of some of these spaces and maybe it's going to be harder than others.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I completely agree. And there's a lot of work to try to create that identity so people want to do that. As a cognitive scientist in language expert, I hope that continues because I don't want languages to die. I want languages to survive because they're so interesting for so many reasons. But I mean, I find them fascinating just for the language part, but I think they, you know, there's a lot of connections to culture as well, which is also very important”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's big economies that do this, it's all it is, it's all about money, and that's what, and so there's a motivation to learn Mandarin. There's a motivation to learn Spanish. There's a motivation to learn English. These languages are very valuable to know because there's so, so many speakers all over the world. There's less of a value economically. It's like kind of what drives this. It's not a, you know, it's not just for fun. I mean, there are these groups that do want to learn language just for language's sake. And there's something to that. But those are rare, those are rarities in general. Those are a few small groups that do that. Not most people don't do that.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason we learn language is to communicate. And we need to use it to make money and to do whatever it is to feed our families. And if that's not happening, then it won't take off. It's not like a game or something. This is like something we use. Why is English so popular? It's not because it's an easy language to learn. Maybe it is. I don't really know. But that's not why it's popular.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my guess is. The function of a language is to do something in a community. Unless there's some function to that language in the community, it's not going to survive. It's not going to be useful. So here's a great example. Language death is super common, okay? Languages are dying all around the world. And here's why they're dying. Yeah, I see this in, it's not happening right now in either the Trevani or the Piotran, but it probably will. And so there's a neighboring group called Mositan, which is I said that it'solate. It's actually, there's a dual. There's two of them. Okay. So there's two languages which are really close, which are Mosatan.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That kind of stuff. You're absolutely right. But I'm saying it is an abstraction such that you don't have to care about their identities to do this thing fast. That's the hypothesis, not mine. From anthropologists are guessing about where words for counting came from is from farming maybe.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People often ask me when I talk to them about this kind of work, and they say, Well, don't these Peter Hahn, don't they have kids? Don't they have a lot of children? I'm like, yeah, they have a lot of children. And they do. They often have families of three or four, five kids. And they go, don't they need the numbers to keep track of their kids? And I always ask this person who says this, like, do you have children? And the answer is always no because that's not how you keep track of your kids. You care about their identities. It's very important to me when I go, I have five children. It doesn't matter which five. If you replaced one with someone else, I would care. A goat, maybe not, right? That's the kind of point. It's an abstraction, something that looks very similar to the one wouldn't matter to me, probably.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going to be true. Yeah. So it's probably, I mean, we don't know this is one of those problems with the snapshot of just current languages, is that we don't know what causes a culture to discover slash invent accounting system. But the hypothesis is the guest out there is something to do with farming. So if you have a bunch of goats and you want to keep track of them, and you have saved 17 goats and you go to bed at night and you get up in the morning, boy, it's easier to have account system to do that. That's an abstraction over a set. So they don't have to”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, here's language just is the words. Here is the words. Like the words for exact count is the limiting factor here. They just don't have them.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, it's easy because we just count them. It's just so easy to count them. But they don't count them because they don't count. They don't have words for this thing. And so they would do approximate. It's totally fascinating. So they would get them approximately right after four or five. Basically, you always get four right, three or four. That's something we can visually see. But after that, you kind of have its approximate number. And so then, and there's a bunch of tasks we did, and they all failed, I mean, failed. They did approximate after five on all those tasks. And it kind of shows that the words You kind of need the words to be able to do these kinds of tasks.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some way to encode the set, so one of them is just I just put a opaque sheet in front of the things I put down a bunch, a set of these things and I put an opaque sheet down. And so you can't see them anymore. And I tell you, do the same thing you were doing before, right? You know, and it's easy if it's two or three. It's very easy. But if I don't have the words for eight, it's a little harder. Like maybe, you know, with practice, well, no.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Not at all. Okay. And so that's our control. And this guy had gone down there before and said that they couldn't do this task, but I just don't know what he did wrong there because they can do this task perfectly well. And I can train my dog to do this task. So of course they can do this task. And so, you know, it's not a hard task. But the other task that was sort of more interesting is like, so then we do a bunch of tasks where you need”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spools of threat, okay? And so then I put out three of these, and your task was to just put one against each of my three things. And they could do that perfectly. So I mean, I would actually do that. It was a very easy task to explain to them because I have did this with this guy, Mike Frank, and he would be my experimenter telling him to do this and showing him to do this. And then we just like, just do it. He did. You'll copy him. All we had to, I didn't have to speak Pyrrha Ha except for know what copy him. Like do what he did is like all we had to be able to say. And then they would do that just perfectly. And so we'd move it up, we'd do some sort of random number of items up to 10. And they basically do perfectly on that. They never get that wrong. I mean, that's not an accounting task, right? That is just a match. You just put one against. It doesn't matter how many. I don't need to know how many there are there to do that correctly. And they would make mistakes, but very, very few. And no more than MIT undergrads. I'm just going to say this is a low stakes.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the words aren't there. And then, and so then we did these other things. Well, if they don't have the words, can they do exact matching kinds of tasks? Can they even do those tasks? And the answer is sort of yes and no. And so yes, they can do them. So here's the tasks that we did. We put out those spools of thread again. Okay. So I put like three out here. And then we gave them some objects. And those happened to be uninflated red balloons. It doesn't really matter what they are. It's just a bunch of exactly the same thing. And it was easy to put down right next to these”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know what that means. That's going to depend on the context. I think it's true in English too, right? If you ask an English person what a few is, I mean, that's going to depend completely on the context”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you do that, okay? And everyone does the same thing. All, you know, we asked like 10 people and they all do exactly the same labeling for one up. And then we just do the same thing down on like random order. Actually, we do some of them up, some of them down first, okay? And so we do”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the point of the task I'm trying to learn their language, and so that's okay. But it does seem like I'm a little slow because they already told me what the word for many was, five, six, seven, and I keep asking. So it's a little funny to do this task over and over. We did this with a guy called Dan was our translator. He's the only one who really speaks Pirah fluently. He's a good bilingual for a bunch of languages, but also English and Piroha. And then a guy called Mike Frank was also a student with me down there. He and I did these things.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a set of objects, okay? These having to be spools of thread doesn't really matter what they are. Identical objects. And when I sort of start off here, I just give you one of those and say, what's that? Okay, so you're a piano speaker, and you tell me what it is. And then I give you two and say, what's that? And nothing's changing in this set except for the number, okay? And then I just ask you to label these things. We just do this for a bunch of different people. And frankly, I did this task. This is fascinating. And it's a weird, it's a little bit weird. So they say the word that they thought was one. It's few, but for the first one. And then maybe they say fewer, maybe they say some for the second. And then for the third or the fourth, they start using the word many for the set. And then five, six, seven, eight. I go all the way to ten. And it's always the same word. And they look at me like I'm stupid because they told me what the word was for six, seven, eight, and I'm going to continue asking them at nine and 10. I'm like, I'm sorry. I just, I just, they understand that I want to know their language.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just don't. And so that's just not a thing you can possibly ask in the future. It's not possible. That is, there's no words for that. So here's how we found this out, okay? So it was thought to be a one too many language. There are three words, four quantifiers for sets. But people had thought that those meant one, two, and many. But what they really mean is few, some and many. Many is correct. It's few, some and many. And so the way we figured this out. And this is kind of cool is that we gave people.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and so numbers are really another fascinating source of information here where you might Naively, I certainly thought that all humans would have words for exact counting. And the Pieroha don't. Okay, so they don't have any words for even one. There's not a word for one in their language. And so there's certainly not word for two, three, or four. So that kind of blows people's minds often. Yeah, that is blowing my mind. That's pretty weird.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in these cases, I'm interested in their words. I would love to study their syntax, their orders of words, but I'm mostly just interested in how languages are connected to their cultures in this way. And so with the Punoha, sort of most interesting, I was working on number there, number information. And so the basic idea is I think language is invented. That's what I get from the words here is that I think language is invented. We talked about color earlier. It's the same idea so that What you need to talk about with someone else is what you're going to invent words for. And so we invent labels for colors that I can see, but that things I need to tell you about so that I can get objects from you or get you to give me the right objects. And I just don't need a word for teal or a word for aquamarine in the Amazon jungle for the most part because I don't have two things which differ on those colors. I just don't have.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly no earthquakes in the Amazon jungle, and the climate isn't bad, so you don't have droughts. And so, you know, in Africa, you've got a lot of moving of people because there's drought problems. And so they get a lot of language contact when you have to, you got to move because you've got no water, then you've got to get going. And then you run into contact with other tribes, other groups. In the Amazon, that's not the case. And so people can stay there for hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of years, I guess. And so these groups have the Chimani and the Pinohar are both isolates in that, and they just, I guess they've just lived there for ages and ages with minimal contact with other outside groups. And so I'm interested in them because they are”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the two groups I've worked with, the Chimani and the Pirahar, are both isolate languages, meaning there's no known connected languages at all. Like just like on their own, there's a lot of those. And most of the isolates occur in the Amazon or in Papua New Guinea and these places where the world has sort of stayed still for a long enough and so there aren't earthquakes, there aren't”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the kind of farming they do. And the other group I've worked with are the Pirahan, which are also in the Amazon and happen to be in Brazil. And that's with a guy called Dan Everett. Who is a linguist, anthropologist who actually lived and worked in the, I mean, he was a missionary actually initially back in the 70s working with trying to translate languages so they could teach them the Bible, teach them Christianity.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cultures can be very, I mean, of course, English and Chinese cultures are very different, but hunter-gatherers are much more different in some ways. And so if culture has an effect on what language is, then we kind of want to look there as well as looking. It's not like the industrialized cultures aren't interesting. Of course they are, but we want to look at non-industrialized cultures as well. And so I worked with two, I've worked with Chimani, which are in Bolivia and Amazon, both in the Amazon, these cases. And there are so-called farmer foragers, which is not hunter-gatherers. It's sort of one up from hunter-gatherers in that they do a little bit of farming as well. A lot of hunting as well, but a little bit of farming. And the kind of farming they do is the kind of farming that I might do if I ever were to grow like tomatoes or something in my backyard. It's not like, so it's not like big field farming. It's just a farming for a family, a few things you do that.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that term weird is from Joe Henrich. He's at Harvard. He's a Harvard evolutionary biologist. And so he works on lots of different topics. And he basically was pushing that observation that we should be careful about the inferences we want to make when we're talking in psychology or mostly in psychology, I guess, about humans if we're talking about undergrads at MIT in Harvard. Those aren't the same, right? These aren't the same things. And so if you want to make inferences about language, for instance, there's a lot of other kinds of languages in the world than English and French and Chinese. And so maybe for language, we care about how culture”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, you know, he's basically a philosopher, philosopher of language in a way, thinking about these things. It's a fine thought. You can't test it in his methods. You can't do a thought experiment to figure that out. You need a scanner. You need brain damage people. You need something. You need ways to measure that. And that's what FMRI offers as a, and patients are a little messier. FMRI is pretty unambiguous, I'd say. It's like very unambiguous. There's no way to say that the language network is doing any of these tasks. You should look at those data. It's like there's no chance that you can say that those networks are overlapping. They're not overlapping. They're just completely different. And so, you know, so you can always make, you know, it's only two people. It's four people or something for the patients and there's something special about them we don't know. But these are just random people.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who have been mesting sections, one person missing missed a section of her brain and was scanned in her lab. And she happened to be a writer for the New York Times. And it was an article in the New York Times about the scanning procedure about what might be learned by sort of the general process of MRI and language. And because she's writing for the New York Times, then all these people started writing to her who also have similar kinds of deficits because they've been, you know, accidentally...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are any of the brain areas the way that they are? And how do they come to be that way? And there's these natural experiments which happen where people get these strange events in their brains at very young ages which wipe out sections of their brain and they behave totally normally and no one knows anything was wrong. And we find out later, because they happen to be accidentally scanned for some reason. It's like, what's happened to your left hemisphere? It's missing. There's not many people who have missed their whole left hemisphere, but they'll be missing some other section of their left or their right. And they behave absolutely normally. We'd never know. So that's like a very interesting current research. This is another project that this person Federenco is working on. She's got all these people contacting her because she's scanned some people.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here features of this kind of argument. So some people get a stroke or something goes really wrong on the left side. Where are the language area would be? And that isn't there. It's not available. And it develops just fine the right. So it's not about the left. It goes to the left. Like this is a very interesting question. It's like, why?”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need any. It doesn't have to be an eight. So, like lots of stuff is modular in the brain that's learned. It doesn't have to, you know, so there's something called the visual word form area in the back. And so it's in the back of your head near the visual cortex. And that is very specialized language, sorry, very specialized brain area, which does visual word processing if you read, if you're a reader. Okay. If you don't read, you don't have it. Okay. Guess what? You spend some time learning to read and you develop that brain area, which does exactly that. And so the modularization is not evidence for innateness. So the modularization of a language area doesn't mean we're born with it. We could have easily learned that. We might have been born with it. We just don't know at this point. We might very well have been born with this left lateralized area. I mean, there's like a lot of other interesting components.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just throw out the movement and just think about that in a different way, you know, then you get some messiness, but the messiness is human language, which it actually fits better. That messiness isn't a problem. It's actually a valuable asset of the theory. And so I think I don't really see a reason to postulate much innate structure. And that's kind of why I think these large language models are learning so well is because I think you can learn the form, the forms of human language from the input. I think that's likely to be true.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the answer is I don't know, of course, but I'm an engineer at heart, I guess, and I sort of think it's fine to postulate that a lot of it's learned. And so I'm guessing that a lot of it's learned. So I think the reason Chomsky went with innateness. Is because he hypothesized movement in his grammar. He was interested in grammar, and movements hard to learn. I think he's right. Movement is a hard thing to learn to learn these two things together and how they interact. And there's like a lot of ways in which you might generate exactly the same sentences. And it's really hard. And so he's like, oh, I guess it's learned. Sorry, so I guess it's not learned. It's innate.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're saying babies don't care. No. There's no evidence that there's anything harder, easier about any language learned, like by three or four they speak that language. And so there's no evidence of anything harder or easier about any human language. They're all kind of equal.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that depends on what you started with, right? So it really depends on how close that second language is to the first language you've got. And so, yes,”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if it were just a communication, then we should have languages which have very, very free word order and we don't have, we have freer, but not free, like there's always.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source