Which of the following statement best summarizes the impact of Noam Chomsky's…
2025
Which of the following statement best summarizes the impact of Noam Chomsky's review of B. F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behaviour" on the development of natural language processing?
- A.
It supported Skinner's behaviorist theory, laying the groundwork for modern NLP
- B.
It introduced computational linguistics as a purely philosophical discipline
- C.
It challenged the behaviorist approach by highlighting the creative nature of language, influencing formal and programmable models of language understanding
- D.
It emphasized that sentence structure alone is sufficient for full language comprehension
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Correct answer: C
Noam Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's 'Verbal Behaviour' fundamentally challenged behaviorist theories of language acquisition. By arguing for innate linguistic structures rather than mere conditioning, Chomsky's critique sparked the cognitive revolution. This shift encouraged NLP researchers to develop formal models of language understanding, moving away from statistical behaviorist approaches towards symbolic and cognitive frameworks.