Another model not for the learning of language

Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan, Charles Yang

Abstract: It is laudable for Yang and Piantadosi (PNAS, 2022) to tackle the important question of how language is generated and learned. Their reported success in learning a range of grammars from small amounts of data is striking, especially since some of these grammars belong to classes which are provably unlearnable under such conditions (Kearns & Valiant, 1994). However, their project is severely undermined by their evaluation method and by their conception of language.