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In the most recent issue of Nature Neuroscience , David Poeppel and his colleagues have published a paper (non-paywalled PDF) detailing research that supports Noam Chomsky's hypothesis that we possess an "internal grammar" that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases. This hypothesis is rejected by most neuroscientists and psychologists, who contend that comprehension of language arises rather from the brain making statistical inferences based on words and sound cues.
From phys.org's report on the research:
"One of the foundational elements of Chomsky's work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language," explains David Poeppel, the study's senior researcher and a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology. "Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner—a process that reflects an 'internal grammar' mechanism."
...the researchers explored whether and how linguistic units are represented in the brain during speech comprehension.
To do so, Poeppel, who is also director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which allows measurements of the tiny magnetic fields generated by brain activity, and electrocorticography (ECoG), a clinical technique used to measure brain activity in patients being monitored for neurosurgery.
...Their results showed that the subjects' brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time.
"Because we went to great lengths to design experimental conditions that control for statistical or sound cue contributions to processing, our findings show that we must use the grammar in our head," explains Poeppel. "Our brains lock onto every word before working to comprehend phrases and sentences. The dynamics reveal that we undergo a grammar-based construction in the processing of language."
This is a controversial conclusion from the perspective of current research, the researchers note, because the notion of abstract, hierarchical, grammar-based structure building is rather unpopular.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 09 2015, @10:00AM
I bet the brain reacts differently when presented with one name, a short list of unfamiliar names, and a long list of familiar names. That doesn't mean there's some deep "name list" grammar in our brains, that's just relying on different layers of and different operations on a memory heirarchy.
And even if brains do appear to be treating words, phrases, and sentences differently, that could simply be learnt behaviour, rather than any deep structure. Those who can juggle juggle 3 cold potatoes differently from how they juggle 1 hot potato, that doesn't mean there's deep potato-juggling structure in the brain.
The greatest weakness of computer nerds (of which I'm one) is to think that Chomsky made great contributions to linguistics - he didn't. He should be lauded for his outspoken stance on political matters, not for any earth-shattering linguistic breakthroughs. Sure, his stuff was interesting, as was Da Vinci's helicopter, but that doesn't mean it will fly.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @10:54AM
FTFA
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @03:49PM
What does English Chinese sound like? :-)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Wednesday December 09 2015, @04:40PM
Both English and Mandarin Chinese are fairly isolating languages, with one or occasionally two morphemes per word. As FatPhil points out, a polysynthetic Eskimo or Aleutian language would have a different underlying structure of what makes a "word".
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:33AM
2 languages? 2 freaking languages? It's claiming to say something about *all* human (at least all humans which have a human brain, which is probably all of them) language processing. Which makes this study a *joke*. I'm happy to keep my "linguist who thinks Chomsky contributed very little that is productive to the field" hat on even though I'm a computer nerd too, and quite closely politically aligned to him.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves