Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing

Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing.

Although sentences unfold sequentially, one word at a time, most linguistic theories propose that their underlying syntactic structure involves a tree of nested phrases rather than a linear sequence of words. Whether and how the brain builds such structures, however, remains largely unknown. Here, we used human intracranial recordings and visual word-by-word presentation of sentences and word l...

On directionality of phrase structure building.

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at ...

A Single Layer Network Model of Center Embedding and Hierarchical Phrase Structure in Sentence Processing

Recurrent connectionist models, such as the simple recurrent network (SRN, Elman, 1991), have been shown to be able to account for people’s ability to process sentences with center embedded structures of limited depth without recourse to a competence grammar that allows unbounded recursion (Christiansen & Chater, 1999). However, the corpus analysis by Karlsson (2007) suggests that in spoken lan...

Phases and Complexity in Phrase Structure Building

The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995–2001) sketches a model that aims to be empirically adequate and theoretically motivated but that does not fit in any clear way with specific performance algorithms such as parsing or generation even though much emphasis is put on “interface properties”. In this paper I propose that a Minimalist Grammar formalization (an extension of Stabler’s 1997 proposal) ...

Sentence Processing and Linguistic Structure