Abstract
Preliminary Experiments on Human Sensitivity to Rhythmic Structure in a Grammar with Recursive Self-Similarity.
Highlights
Processing of hierarchical structures has been proposed as a uniquely human ability, a hallmark of the linguistic system that distinguishes human language from animal communication systems (Hauser et al, 2002; Martins, 2012)
Our results indicate that for the majority of our participants, rhythm alone may not be enough to learn this type of grammar; musical background, age, instruction, and the specific types of foil grammars may all be contributing factors
Two experiments were conducted, using Fibonacci grammars similar to those used in Saddy (2009) and Shirley (2014)
Summary
Processing of hierarchical structures has been proposed as a uniquely human ability, a hallmark of the linguistic system that distinguishes human language from animal communication systems (Hauser et al, 2002; Martins, 2012). Artificial Grammar Learning experiments have shown that adult participants are able to learn the context-free grammar AnBn, whose generation requires hierarchical rules, even without the need for semantic information (Lai and Poletiek, 2013). Parsing and generalizing grammars like AnBn requires detection that a structure, e.g., AB, is embedded between elements of another structure, e.g., A...B. Other species have not been shown unequivocally to be able to learn on the basis of the center-embedding principle required of AnBn (rather than using other strategies, Corballis, 2007; van Heijningen et al, 2009; Beckers et al, 2012; Poletiek et al, 2015; Ravignani et al, 2015), which is taken as evidence that processing of recursion is a human-specific capacity.
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