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army1987 comments on Academic Cliques - Less Wrong
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Question: my understanding is that the fact that humans manage to learn language so readily in early childhood, when compared with how bad we are at objectively simpler tasks like arithmetic, does suggest we have some kind of innate, specialized "language module", even if the Chomskyan view gets some important details wrong. Would that be generally accepted among linguistics, or is it contentious? And in the latter case, why would it be contentious?
(I ask because this understanding of language is one of the main building blocks in what I understand about human intelligence.)
Children hear adults speaking all the time, but they don't usually hear adults doing maths very often.
I've wondered about that. Someone should try writing an iPad app that a toddler can play with to have their brain bombarded by math, and see if that leads to math coming as naturally to them as language. I doubt it would work but it might be worth trying.
It seems that simply bombarding the brain isn't sufficient, even for language, and that social interaction is required (see this study), so that playing math games with the child would be a better idea.
How does the brain decide whether it thinks of something as a social interaction? I would assume that computer/video games with significant social components hack into that, so hacking into it to teach math should be doable.
I believe the way it works for language is that one can learn it from television, but not radio.
Nope. It needs to be something with feedback.
That makes intuitive sense, at least in hindsight, since TV provides ample non-linguistic information that you can learn to associate with the linguistic information.
I think this book maybe of some interest to you Chris. It was the text book recommend for a CogSci class I did, dealing with how cognitive systems develop in response to their environment.