I think if you look at child development research, you’ll see that kids can learn to do crazy shit with very little input, waaay less than you’d need to train a neural net to do the same. So either kids are the luckiest neural nets and always make the correct adjustment after failing, or they have some innate knowledge that isn’t pattern-based at all.

There’s even some examples in linguistics specifically, where children tend towards certain grammar rules despite all evidence in their language pointing to another rule. Pure pattern-matching would find the real-world rule without first modelling a different (universally common) rule.