New podcast on I, Scientist!
A deep dive into how babies learn language with cognitive scientist Bálint Forgács from the ELTE BabyLab in Budapest. We explore the connectionist-vs-symbolic debate through the lens of infant cognition — how babies learn from one example rather than big data, why categories may be neither in the world nor in the mind but "transjective," and what newborns already know about speech before hearing a single word. In the second half, we turn to AI: why LLMs smuggle in symbols while pretending to be statistical machines, how they hack into our meaning-attribution system, and Sperber's Guru Effect as the perfect metaphor for why we find them so convincing.