I think Chomsky's theory mainly focused on how we learn languages and was truly a revolutionizing move considered with the very simplistic explanations offered by theories like behaviorism. It may not be fruitful to try to find solutions in his theories about learning other things which were not his focus in the first place.

Thanks for your answer Wondwosen. I realize that Chomsky focused upon language but why should language learning be any different from other learning? Also surely linguistic claims should be verifiable empirically just like any other scientific claims? Dave

Hi David,

I interpret your question as being about universals in general. Chomsky meant, according to my reading of his works, that there exist some meaning-representation universals that he called a grammar. I ... prefer to have doubts that he meant strictly what linguists call a grammar. Such universal rules have not been tested and it seems difficult to test them as they are not still clear. I see you oriented the question to the domain of music. Here some papers which could serve for some general reasoning (excuse me for the lack of homogeneity in the citing):

Trehub, S. E., & Trainor, L. J. (1993). Listening strategies in infancy: The roots of music and language development. In Thinking in sound: the cognitive psychology of human audition, ed. S. McAdams and E. Bigand . Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 278-327.

Music, language and meaning: brain signatures of semantic processing, Stefan Koelsch, Elisabeth Kasper, Daniela Sammler, Katrin Schulze, Thomas Gunter & Angela D Friederici

http://www-cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/cogs179/koelsch-needle.pdf

Cognitive representation of “musical fractals”: Processing hierarchy and recursion in the auditory domain, Article in Cognition 161:31-45 · April 2017

Article Cognitive representation of “musical fractals”: Processing h...

Best,

Velina

Thankyou for this Velina. Yes Chomsky focussed upon language and Universal Grammar but there are perhaps Universals for other domains too. Chomsky thought linguistics should be a branch of psychology so perhaps we are talking about grammars which are innate to the functions of the mind. But this is rational conjecture. My question for language is, can we test this innateness empirically, other than just to say 'well it must be like this because children learn languages so quickly'? Dave

Dave, yes, functions of the mind. Your question for language is, can we test this innateness empirically. Empirically - that could mean, for example, that we have to take different languages and try seeing in what are they similar at the first stage of language mastering by infants. I try to understand this, as many others do. Take a look, if you wont, at

Working Paper Information, Entropy, Meaning, Concept Complexity – A Statis...

Best

I think the empirical data for Chomsky's theory were mainly drawn from European languages. There were many exceptions to his generalizations even when universal grammar was widely accepted. I don't see any need for testing Chomsky's theory empirically now because that has already been done and the field has already moved ahead with new approaches like usage- based linguistics which is discrediting universal grammar (on the basis of empirical evidence as they say) and assuming better acceptance in explaining how we learn languages. Though we still don't know the fate of this new approach, I think the testing field for empirical analysis for any such theory would still remain the various corpora of data we're increasingly acquiring about the thousands of languages we have all around the world.

Hm... Hi, Wondwosen. It can seem like that becouse the level investigated is the grammar in the strict linguistic's sense of the word. However the semantic activation of the brain caused by concepts was found being similar for diferent languages, including representatives of quite different groups such as Mandarin and French. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.04173.pdf

Concerning the representation of sentences - recent studies suggest commonality of neural representations of sentences across individuals. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.23692/full

So, perhaps what is common is a bit deeper than the language surface that linguistic studies use to investigate?

We are really in the Chomskyan sense talking about a grammar of the mind which then, across languages, becomes represented in linguistic grammar at the level of syntax. There ought to be therefore conceptual grammatical commonality across all languages in such as subject, object, intentionality, causality in verb action, time in terms of tense. Obviously in terms of the sentence syntax, word orders then differ as for example the order of object pronouns and adjectives. Dave

Dave, agreed. Yes... " There ought to be therefore conceptual grammatical commonality across all languages in such as subject, object.." and ... perhaps that's all... Tense is not on the list of common features (e.g. chinese is without verb tense), the questions related to, as you propose, pronouns and adjectives (etc., I imagine) are to be taken whith caution as the parts of speech in the different languages are differently shaped. For example Riau Indonesian

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668441.001.0001/acprof-9780199668441-chapter-4

There is a long list of wonderings and an ongoing debate arround the Piraha language which does not display a recursive structure and does not have numerals...

A lot of unknown.

However, as you said, there should be a grammar of the mind. In my domain it is simple to find supporting arguments. The said in one language can be transmitted as Meaning in any other language, so this corresponds to the known Church-Turring thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis and indicates that there exist an underlying, basic, common calculus.

Not easy to be found.