Welcome to the Quantum Science Podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language.

By constructing artificial languages that have these rules,

linguists can use neural networks to explore how people learn. That's next.

Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the Simon's Foundation

to enhance public understanding of science.

Learning a language can't be that hard. Every baby in the world manages to do it in a few years.

Figuring out how the process works is another story.

Linguists have devised elaborate theories to explain it,

but recent advances in machine learning have added a new wrinkle.

When computer scientists began building the language models

that power modern chat bots like chat GPT, they set aside decades of research in linguistics,

and their gamble seemed to pay off. But are their creations really learning? Tall Linzen is a

computational linguist at New York University.

It's hard to know what to conclude from the behavior of those models.

Even if they do something that looks like what a human does, they might be doing it for very

different reasons.

It's not just a matter of quibbling about definitions.

If language models really are learning language, researchers may need new theories to explain

how they do it.

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