How Deeply Human Is Language?: Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy

A leading neurolinguist explains linguistic theory and large language models—the top contenders for understanding human language—and evaluates them in the context of the brain.

Contemporary linguistics, founded and inspired by Noam Chomsky, seeks to understand the hallmark of our humanity—language. Linguists develop powerful tools to discover how knowledge of language is acquired and how the brain puts it to use. AI experts, using vastly different methods, create remarkable neural networks—l...