We need quite different functionality than statistics to model language. We may need this functionality in other areas of intelligence, but with language it is obvious. Or, for the DL community – we can model anything with statistics, of course. It will just not be a very good model …

What follows is that the synaptic plasticity that produces statistical learning does not allow us to build a human language model. Weight adjustment of connections in a graph is simply not sufficient – under any possible model of language to capture language competency.

This is where it becomes interesting. We have just stated that the synaptic plasticity hypothesis of memory is wrong, or else our mammalian brains would be incapable of producing novel sentences and novel text, something we have not memorized before.