Talk:Current bio - June 2018/@comment-35481611-20180628184308

I'm in the same boat as you, Molly. For as vital as core cognitive processes of language acquisition and elaboration are, an approach like this seems so superficial. So it's neat, but pretty far afield from grammar. Rings a bit like 'chimp cooking' to me.

I also read a paper recently that posited that the versions of this design that use auditory stimuli (Get it?! Like language!!) potentially have a huge confound as a result of overlapping prosodic (wrong word) features between so-called grammatic and so-called agrammatic sequences. So keep that in mind too, along with your intuitive uneasiness about this research, the unflattering comparison to chimp cooking, the stink of Marc Hauser, and other issues...

What do animals learn in artificial grammar studies? Gabriël J.L. Beckers, Robert C. Berwick, Kazuo Okanoya et al. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (2017)