> [St.Augustine quote] I remember this

I’m absolutely positive St. Augustine wasn’t some prodigious person who was able to self-introspect his early language learning and break past infant amnesia. If we’d have any means on verifying, my bet would be on that he just made this all up, post-hoc rationalizing all of that.

He can remember some sensory and pre-language mental states (desire to achieve some other state, like change of body position, or experience a taste, or a different view), but all that “whimpering and grunts and various gestures of my limbs” rationalized as purposeful communication is pure fiction. At least to my understanding, of course.

> Also note how important it is that infants instinctively understand nonverbal communication.

What does “understand” here means, and what infants exactly?

From what we know about human development, before somewhere between 2 and 9 months of age infants are unable to purposefully communicate in principle. No recipient in mind: they don’t track gaze, they don’t point at objects, they don’t share affect. Purely reflexively they can cry when they hear others crying (just like how we yawn with others), but that’s about it - just a resonance, not communication.

Obviously, comparing two different machineries suggests us they’re different (duh!) Humans aren’t LLMs, and language acquisition happens significantly different between two. But stochastic parrot is not an animal, it’s a basic principle, and that principle may possibly hold true to all life with associative learning capabilities.