So anyway, I wind up with the idea that there’s a region of my kid’s brain already building the low-level patterns that will correspond to composing and speaking language, but that this region of my kid’s brain is currently disconnected from the mouth/tongue/throat motor control area of his brain. Sooner or later, his brain will decide it’s ready, that connection will finally form, and then he’ll start talking!
To offer anecdata about this, I was, too, a late talker. I didn’t start seriously talking until I was about 3.5 years old!
My parents tell me that it was very sudden. Basically one day I was not really talking, using very few words, and the next I was suddenly speaking in full, complex sentences.
I’ve never been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I did continue to be developmentally behind, but I was smart enough that this balanced out and no one really noticed but me after the fact when I learned enough developmental psychology to realize what had been going on.
Yeah Sowell’s books says that immediately speaking full sentences is a pretty common pattern, or at least not unheard of. I think Teller was in that category.
In fact this is one reason I’ve long been skeptical of the people who say you need “embodied cognition” to get AGI. Passive predictive (“self-supervised”) learning gets you pretty far by itself, such that you learned to speak complete sentences purely from predictive learning, not trial-and-error (or at least minimal trial-and-error).
To offer anecdata about this, I was, too, a late talker. I didn’t start seriously talking until I was about 3.5 years old!
My parents tell me that it was very sudden. Basically one day I was not really talking, using very few words, and the next I was suddenly speaking in full, complex sentences.
I’ve never been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I did continue to be developmentally behind, but I was smart enough that this balanced out and no one really noticed but me after the fact when I learned enough developmental psychology to realize what had been going on.
Wow, neat!
Yeah Sowell’s books says that immediately speaking full sentences is a pretty common pattern, or at least not unheard of. I think Teller was in that category.
In fact this is one reason I’ve long been skeptical of the people who say you need “embodied cognition” to get AGI. Passive predictive (“self-supervised”) learning gets you pretty far by itself, such that you learned to speak complete sentences purely from predictive learning, not trial-and-error (or at least minimal trial-and-error).