Failures and Successes to Learn a Core Conceptual Distinction from the Statistics of Language
Generic statements like "tigers are striped" and "cars have radios" communicate information that is, in general, true. However, while the first statement is true in principle, the second is true only statistically. People are exquisitely sensitive to this principled-vs-statistical distinction. It has been argued that this ability to distinguish between something being true by virtue of it being a category member versus being true because of mere statistical regularity, is a general property of people's conceptual machinery and cannot itself be learned. We investigate whether the distinction between principled and statistical properties can be learned from language itself. If so, it raises...
| Authors | Zhimin Hu, Jeroen van Paridon, Gary Lupyan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 July 2026 |
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