Top Highlights

• Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience—or so the thinking goes.
• many language scientists—including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics—believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.
• Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).
• A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry, and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input.
• And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.

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