When I typically begin a series of blogs to conduct nerdy inquiry into an abstract topic, I don't generally know where I'm going to end up. This series on LLMs was unusual in that in our first post, I outlined pretty much the exact topics I would go on to cover.

Here's where I had spitballed we might go:

• The surprisingly inseparable interconnection between form and meaning
• Blundering our way to computational precision through human communication; Or, the generative tension between regularity and randomness
• The human (and now, machine) capacity for learning and using language may simply be a matter of scale
• Is language as separable from thought (and, for that matter, from the world) as Cormac McCarthy said?
• Implicit vs. explicit learning of language and literacy

Indeed, we then went on to explore each of these areas, in that order. Cool!

Language is a uniquely human phenomenon that develops in children with remarkable ease and fluency. Yet questions remain about how we acquire language. Is it innately wired in our brain, or do we learn all facets rapidly from birth?

Two books – Rethinking Innateness and The Language Game – provide us with some fascinating perspectives on language learning that bears implications for how we think about learning to read and write, and furthermore, for how we talk about the power and limitations of AI.

A recent paper caught my eye, Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation, and despite the immediate mind glazing effect of the word “ontogenesis,” I found the model well worth digging into and sharing here—and it may bear relevance to conversations on orthographic mapping.

• Bordag, D., Gor, K., & Opitz, A. (2021). Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000250

How we learn words and all their phonological, morphological, orthographic, and semantic characteristics is a fascinating topic of research—most especially in the areas of written word recognition and in the learning of a new language.