Yes, lots of people have argued that Chomsky is wrong about various things for various reasons and at various times. The point of my post was not to get into all of those historical arguments, but to point out that recent developments in LLMs are largely irrelevant. But I'll briefly respond to some of your broader points.
You mention 'neural networks' learning rules of grammar. Again, this is relevant to Chomsky's argument only to the extent that such devices do so on the basis of the kind of data available to a child. Here you implicitly reference a body of research that's largely non-existent. Where are the papers showing that neural networks can learn, say, ECP effects, ACD, restrictions on possible scope interpretations, etc. etc., on the basis of a realistic child linguistic corpus?
Your 'continuities' argument cuts both ways. There are continuities between human perception and bat perception and between bat communication and human communication; but we still can't echolocate, and bats still can't hold conversations. The specifics matter here. Is bat echolocation just a more complex variant of my very slight ability to sense whether I'm in an enclosed location or an outdoor space when I have my eyes closed? And is the explanation for why bats but not humans have this ability that bat cognition is just more sophisticated than human cognition? I'm sure neural networks can be trained to do echolocation too. Humans can train an artificial network to do echolocation, therefore it can't be a species-specific capacity of bats. << This seems like a terrible argument, no?
Poverty of the stimulus arguments don't really depend at all on the assumption that parents don't correct children, or that children ignore such corrections. If you look at specific examples of the kind of grammatical rules that tend to interest generative linguists (e.g. ACD, ECP effects, ...) then parents don't even know about any of these, and certainly aren't correcting their children on them.
Chomsky has never made any specific estimate of the 'amount' of input that babies receive, so he certainly can't be known to have underestimated it. Poverty of the stimulus arguments are at heart not quantitative but rather are based on the assumption that certain specific kinds of data are not likely to be available in a child's input. This assumption has been validated by experimental and corpus studies (e.g. https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/LidzWa...)
> Babies hear language from the moment they're born until they learn to speak
I can assure you that this insight is not lost on anyone who works on child language acquisition :)
A realistic child linguistic corpus for a 2 year old starting to form sentences would be about 15 million words over the course of their lifetime. Converted to LM units that's maybe about 20 million tokens. There are small language models trained on sets that small.
Some LMs are specifically trained on child-focused small corpora in the 10 million range, e.g. BabyLM: https://babylm.github.io.
Keep in mind that before age 2, children are using individual words and getting much richer feedback than LMs are.
Humans can and do echolocate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation. There are also anatomical differences that are not cognitive that affect the abilities like echolocation. For example, the positioning and frequency response of sensors (e.g. ears) can affect echolocation performance.
Yes, humans can echolocate to a limited extent, just as some animals have very limited analogs of human language. That was the point of the comparison. It is no more sensible to view human language as just a more complex variant of vervet monkey calls than it is to view bat echolocation as just a more complex variant of whatever limited capacity humans have in that area. There is continuity viewed from the outside, if you squint a little, but that's unlikely to correspond to continuity in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Bats, for example, can make precise calculations of distance based on a built-in reference for the speed of sound: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024352118
Children don't get 'rich feedback' at all on the grammatical structure of their sentences. I think this idea is probably based on a misconception of what 'grammar' is from a generative linguistics perspective. When was the last time that a child got rich feedback on their misinterpretation of an ACD construction? https://www.bu.edu/bucld/files/2011/05/29-SyrettBUCLD2004.pd...
LLMs trained on small datasets don't perform that well from the point of view of language acquisition – even up to 100 million tokens. There's not a very large literature on this because, as I said, there are many more people interested in making a drive-by critique of generative linguistics than there are people who are genuinely interested in investigating different models of child language acquisition. But here is one suggestive result: https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.761.pdf See also the last paragraph of p.6 onwards of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03228
The other point that's often missed in evaluations of these models is their capacity for learning completely non-human-like languages. Thus, the BabyLM models have some limited success in learning (for example) some island constraints, but could just have easily acquired languages without island constraints. That then leaves the question of why we do not see human languages without such constraints.
>Children don't get 'rich feedback' at all on the grammatical structure of their sentences.
They probably do get parents and the like correcting them or giving an example. Kid says we goed fish, adult say yeah we went fishing. I taught English as a foreign language a bit and people learn almost entirely from examples like that rather than talking about ellipsis or any sort of grammar jargon.
It seems brains / neurons / LLMs are good at pattern recognition. Brains probably quicker on the uptake than LLM backpropagation though.
That particular example is irrelevant to poverty of the stimulus arguments because no-one has ever suggested that kids acquiring English lack evidence for the irregular past tense of ‘go’.
See above for some examples of the kinds of grammatical principles that can form the basis of a poverty of the stimulus argument. They’re not generally the kind of thing that parental corrections could conceivably help with, for two reasons:
1) (The main reason) Poverty of the stimulus arguments relate to features of grammatical constructions that are rarely exemplified. As examples are rarely uttered, deviant instances are rarely corrected, even assuming the presence of superlatively wise and attentive caregivers.
2) (The reason that you mention) Explicit instruction on grammatical rules has almost no effect on most people, especially young children. So corrections at most add a few more examples of bad sentences to the child’s dataset, which they can probably obtain anyway via more indirect cues.
If corrections were really effective, someone should be able to do a killer experiment where they show an improved (i.e. more adult-like) handling of, say, quantifier scope in four year olds after giving them lots of relevant corrections. I am open minded about the outcome of such an experiment, but I’d bet a fairly large amount of money that it would go nowhere.
You mention 'neural networks' learning rules of grammar. Again, this is relevant to Chomsky's argument only to the extent that such devices do so on the basis of the kind of data available to a child. Here you implicitly reference a body of research that's largely non-existent. Where are the papers showing that neural networks can learn, say, ECP effects, ACD, restrictions on possible scope interpretations, etc. etc., on the basis of a realistic child linguistic corpus?
Your 'continuities' argument cuts both ways. There are continuities between human perception and bat perception and between bat communication and human communication; but we still can't echolocate, and bats still can't hold conversations. The specifics matter here. Is bat echolocation just a more complex variant of my very slight ability to sense whether I'm in an enclosed location or an outdoor space when I have my eyes closed? And is the explanation for why bats but not humans have this ability that bat cognition is just more sophisticated than human cognition? I'm sure neural networks can be trained to do echolocation too. Humans can train an artificial network to do echolocation, therefore it can't be a species-specific capacity of bats. << This seems like a terrible argument, no?
Poverty of the stimulus arguments don't really depend at all on the assumption that parents don't correct children, or that children ignore such corrections. If you look at specific examples of the kind of grammatical rules that tend to interest generative linguists (e.g. ACD, ECP effects, ...) then parents don't even know about any of these, and certainly aren't correcting their children on them.
Chomsky has never made any specific estimate of the 'amount' of input that babies receive, so he certainly can't be known to have underestimated it. Poverty of the stimulus arguments are at heart not quantitative but rather are based on the assumption that certain specific kinds of data are not likely to be available in a child's input. This assumption has been validated by experimental and corpus studies (e.g. https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/LidzWa...)
> Babies hear language from the moment they're born until they learn to speak
I can assure you that this insight is not lost on anyone who works on child language acquisition :)