The emerging function of verb in ections in German language acquisition is modeled with a connectionist network. A network that is initially presented only with a semantic representation of sentences uses the in ectional verb ending -t to mark those sentences that are low in transitivity, whereas all other verb endings occur randomly. This behavior matches an early stage in German language acqu...

There is a surprising degree of overlapping structure evident across the languages of the world. One factor leading to cross-linguistic similarities may be constraints on human learning abilities. Linguistic structures that are easier for infants to learn should predominate in human languages. If correct, then (a) human infants should more readily acquire structures that are consistent with the...

oblects

Comprehension failures in agrammatic aphasics, as well as their difficulties in sentence construction, have been attributed to an underlying deficit involving the retrieval of syntactic structure. In this study we show that four agrammatic patients display a remarkable sensitivity to structural information, as indicated by their performance on a grammaticality judgment task. These results indic...

In this paper we consider some well-known facts in syntax from a physics perspective, which allows us to establish some remarkable equivalences. Specifically, we observe that the operation MERGE put forward by N. Chomsky in 1995 can be interpreted as a physical information coarsegraining. Thus, MERGE in linguistics entails information renormalization in physics, according to different time scal...

Previous words in the sentence can influence the processing of the current word in the timescale of hundreds of milliseconds. The current research provides a possible explanation of how certain aspects of this on-line language processing can occur, based on the dynamics of recurrent cortical networks. We simulate prefrontal area BA47 as a recurrent network that receives on-line input of “gramma...

We study several extensions of the notion of alternation from context-free grammars to context-sensitive and arbitrary phrase-structure grammars. Thereby new grammatical characterizations are obtained for the class of languages that are accepted by alternating pushdown automata.

Does the language processing system make use of abstract grammatical categories and representations that are not directly visible from the surface form of a linguistic expression? This study examines stem-formation processes and conjugation classes, a case of ‘pure’ morphology that provides insight into the role of grammatical structure in language processing. We report results from a cross-mod...