However, this Morse error looks really alien to me, in fact I have trouble imagining any human making this kind of mistakes.
Mm. If you buy the idea that it’s memorized a single response and is falling back onto that as the maximum likelihood answer overgeneralized (no matter how tiny the posterior of that might be) answer, then it does have human analogues—small children are particularly infamous for pointing at things and going “gavagai? gavagai?”
The first time my kid called me “Daddy” my heart melted. That feeling was tempered somewhat the first time he called a stranger on the street “Daddy.” Today he called the roomba “Daddy” and I’m starting to feel a little insulted. My wife has it worse, though. He calls her “milk.”
(If I remembering being a little kid and my siblings correctly, this would not be remotely the strangest sort of linguistic behavior one would’ve observed.)
Seing your comment I now remember that one of my sister would answer the question “What colour is this ?” <pointing at something> by “blue” no matter what the colour was.
Mm. If you buy the idea that it’s memorized a single response and is falling back onto that as the maximum likelihood answer overgeneralized (no matter how tiny the posterior of that might be) answer, then it does have human analogues—small children are particularly infamous for pointing at things and going “gavagai? gavagai?”
(If I remembering being a little kid and my siblings correctly, this would not be remotely the strangest sort of linguistic behavior one would’ve observed.)
Seing your comment I now remember that one of my sister would answer the question “What colour is this ?” <pointing at something> by “blue” no matter what the colour was.
She has good taste in colors! If you have to have only one...