Brain complexity: Chomski's internal grammar found (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 08, 2015, 15:55 (3273 days ago) @ David Turell

Noam Chomski has contended that the brain has an onboard grammar mechanism that sets us up for language interpretation:-"A team of neuroscientists has found new support for MIT linguist Noam Chomsky's decades-old theory that we possess an "internal grammar" that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases. -
"'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 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. The sentences were presented in an isochronous fashion—identical timing between words—and participants listened to both predictable sentences (e.g., "New York never sleeps," "Coffee keeps me awake"), grammatically correct, but less predictable sentences (e.g., "Pink toys hurt girls"), or word lists ("eggs jelly pink awake") and various other manipulated sequences.-"The design allowed the researchers to isolate how the brain concurrently tracks different levels of linguistic abstraction—sequences of words ("furiously green sleep colorless"), phrases ("sleep furiously" "green ideas"), or sentences ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously")—while removing intonational speech cues and statistical word information, which many say are necessary in building sentences.-"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."-Comment: The research used two languages which shows the mechanism fits any and all. The brain is built to help us and cooperate with us in all uses.