Syntax

What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building

Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them. In this Perspective, we discuss two proposed functions for neural oscillations - chunking and multiscale information integration - and evaluate their merits and limitations taking into account a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural languages. We highlight insights that provide a tangible starting point for a neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.

The 'Comparative Logic' and Why We Need to Explain Interlanguage Grammars

In this paper we argue that Bley-Vroman’s Comparative Fallacy, which warns against comparisons between native speakers and learners in second-language acquisition (SLA) research, is not justified on either theoretical or methodological grounds and should be abandoned as it contravenes the explanatory nature of SLA research. We argue that for SLA to be able to provide meaningful explanations, grammatical comparisons with a baseline (usually of native speakers although not always the case) are not only justified but necessary, a position which we call the ‘Comparative Logic’. The methodological choices assumed by this position ensure that interlanguage grammars are analysed in their own right and respecting their own principles. Related issues, such as why we focus on the native speaker and why investigating deficits in linguistic-cognitive SLA is essential in our field are discussed as well.

Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication

The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties-those related to word order-result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models of complexity and ambiguity and simulate grammars with optimized word-order parameters on large-scale data from 51 languages. Evolution of grammars toward efficiency results in word-order patterns that predict a large subset of the major word-order correlations across languages.

Linguistic explanation and domain specialization: a case study in bound variable anaphora

The core question behind this Frontiers research topic is whether explaining linguistic phenomena requires appeal to properties of human cognition that are specialized to language. We argue here that investigating this issue requires taking linguistic research results seriously, and evaluating these for domain-specificity. We present a particular empirical phenomenon, bound variable interpretations of pronouns dependent on a quantifier phrase, and argue for a particular theory of this empirical domain that is couched at a level of theoretical depth which allows its principles to be evaluated for domain-specialization. We argue that the relevant principles are specialized when they apply in the domain of language, even if analogs of them are plausibly at work elsewhere in cognition or the natural world more generally. So certain principles may be specialized to language, though not, ultimately, unique to it. Such specialization is underpinned by ultimately biological factors, hence part of UG.