Revisiting the poverty of the stimulus: hierarchical generalization without a hierarchical bias in recurrent neural networks

Understand

Syntactic rules in natural language typically need to make reference to hierarchical sentence structure.

• However, the simple examples that language learners receive are often equally compatible with linear rules.
• Children consistently ignore these linear explanations and settle instead on the correct hierarchical one.
• This fact has motivated the proposal that the learner's hypothesis space is constrained to include only hierarchical rules.