, in an article published in the August 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and titled “Unsupervised Learning of Natural Languages,” the Israelis Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, two of them physicists, one a computer scientist and one a psychologist, argue otherwise. They have, the four maintain, developed a mathematical model — or as they put it, “an unsupervised algorithm that discovers hierarchical structure in any sequence of data” — that explains how a child, unaided by an innate mental grammar of any kind, can learn languages as diverse as English and Chinese by precisely the trial-and-error method that Chomsky dismissed as insufficient. Moreover, this model, they write, has actually been tested on computers, which, when fed between 10,000 and 120,000 sentences in languages they originally were unfamiliar with — a not enormous quantity considering the number of sentences spoken to an average 3- or 4-year-old every day — were able to decode these languages’ grammatical structure and to produce grammatically acceptable sentences in them.
I must confess that, having tried reading “Unsupervised Learning of Natural Languages,” I lack the mathematics to follow it very far. Moreover, even if the algorithm in question works, it would still have to be demonstrated, in order to refute Chomsky’s theory of “innate grammar,” that such a model, or one like it, is itself innate in the human mind. But for linguists, the possible implications are enormous. An entire era may be about to come to an end — and with it a good part of the reputation of the man most identified with it. It would be poetic justice indeed if the Israel-bashing Chomsky were knocked off his scientific pedestal by a group of scientists from Israel.
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