Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the me-talk-english-good dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @10:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @10:54AM (#273878)

    How many different gramatically-unrelated languages was this performed in? I'm guessing 1.

    FTFA

    The study's subjects listened to sentences in both English and Mandarin Chinese in which the hierarchical structure between words, phrases, and sentences was dissociated from intonational speech cues—the rise and fall of the voice—as well as statistical word cues.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +4  
       Interesting=1, Informative=3, Total=4
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @03:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @03:49PM (#273968)

    What does English Chinese sound like? :-)

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Wednesday December 09 2015, @04:40PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @04:40PM (#273994) Journal

    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

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:33AM (#274177) Homepage
      Dude, thanks for the support!

      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