[why-el]

> Humans who learn to comprehend language must learn about the underlying statistical structure of language

This comes up a lot, but is the evidence really there for it? Granted, we (humans) have mental models for "this is most likely what this person means", but I don't think that says a lot about the "underlying statistical structure of language". It seems to me like by the time such statistical probing takes place, for instance trying to decipher what someone means, the language learning already took place. Or do you mean something else?

Note: I am not an expert in this field. I studied some papers back in college addressing these topics and the evidence back then (out of the generative grammar school) was fairly convincing in refuting this statistical learning assertion. I wonder what papers or research you had in mind here.