Abstract
The author acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-490).
Highlights
There have been constant debates about the connection between the theoretical postulates of generative linguistics (Chomsky, 1965, 1995) and the experimental research carried out in psycho-/neurolinguistics. This crossdisciplinary relationship has been approached from noticeable distinct positions, including some views taking generative accounts as well-suited on their own for experimental investigation (e.g., Marantz, 2005; Sprouse and Hornstein, 2016), others proposing a reconsideration of certain generative assumptions about processing issues (e.g., Lewis and Phillips, 2015; Mancini, 2018), and others openly advocating for adopting alternative linguistic frameworks (e.g., Townsend and Bever, 2001; Ferreira, 2005; Jackendoff, 2007; Christiansen and Chater, 2017)
Real-time processing data are generally consistent with theoretical considerations, it is noteworthy that experimental results from psycholinguistics are rarely incorporated into generative accounts
This limited interaction between disciplines is motivated by the competence-performance distinction (Chomsky, 1965), instantiated as the computational and algorithmic levels of analysis (Marr, 1982), with linguistics developing formal accounts of grammatical phenomena independently from the psycholinguistic evidence about how they manifest in real-time processing
Summary
There have been constant debates about the connection between the theoretical postulates of generative linguistics (Chomsky, 1965, 1995) and the experimental research carried out in psycho-/neurolinguistics (see Poeppel and Embick, 2005; Embick and Poeppel, 2015). Is not obvious from the external input, it must be generated internally, presumably in accordance with the rules and constraints of some sort of real-time structure-building mechanism In this respect, any computational-algorithmic account of structure generation would require specifying the formal properties of such a mechanism and, in addition, determining how its time-dependent steps are executed during online sentence processing. Recent neurolinguistic research has shown that neural oscillations exhibit subtle sensitivity to abstract syntactic structure, either tracking the hierarchical levels of speech sequences without prosodic cues (Ding et al, 2016) or showing spectro-temporal modulations driven by underlying hierarchical structure (Nelson et al, 2017) This reflection of hierarchical structure in oscillatory patterns suggests that the structurebuilding mechanism could incrementally group words together in a Merge-like manner during sentence comprehension (cf Frank and Christiansen, 2018). This raises the question of whether the incremental Merge-like mechanism that generates syntactic structures incorporates a predictive component, with top-down syntactic predictions preceding and modulating the bottom-up processing of sentences
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