Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Language Perception 64
Complex syntax involves recursion. 11 Recursion is proposed by Hauser, Chomsky and
Fitch (2002) as key component of human language. They propose, while other prerequisites
may be shared with other animals, no other species has a comparable capacity to
recombine meaningful units into an unlimited variety of larger structures: While finitestate
grammars can be learned by primates, phrase-structure grammars can not (Fitch &
Hauser, 2004). 11
In linguistics, there are two main accounts to theorize about syntactic parsing: two-stage
accounts and interactive accounts. Two-stage accounts assume initial processing (usually
modular) and subsequent processing (usually not modular), e.g., the influential
“Garden-Path” theory established by Frazier (cf. Frazier, 1987). A first analysis is chosen
on the basis of certain assumptions (e.g., “Minimal Attachment”). Alternative twostage
accounts propose that the processor initially adopts an analysis in which a thematic
role can be assigned to a new constituent (e.g., Abney, 1989; Pritchett, 1992).
Interactive accounts assume that all potentially relevant sources of information are immediately
used and affects further processing (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1989; Taraban
& McClelland, 1988; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1977). They generally hypothesize
that the processor activates all possible sentence analyses in parallel and these which
receive support stay activated. Thus, processing is easy when only one analysis receives
support while processing difficulties occur when two or more analyses receive equal
support. For a more in-depth discussion of these theories, see e.g., Pickering and van
Gompel (2006).
It is often assumed that working memory plays an important role in sentence processing.
Memory limitations may affect the ease with which sentences are processed. For
instance, Gibson (1998) proposed the syntactic locality prediction theory which claims
that two factors – storage costs and integration costs – contribute to sentence complexity
because both draw on the same memory resources. Storage costs occur with a dependency
between two syntactic elements when one element has to be stored in memory
before it can be integrated with a later element. Thus, both costs increase as more new
discourse referents have to been processed.
11
In general, two types of grammar rules can be distinguished: a finite-state grammar involves the processing
of a simple, local rule (e.g., (AB) n generating local transitions between As and Bs, i.e., ABABAB),
the phrase structure grammar the processing of a complex, hierarchical rule (e.g., A n B n , i.e. AAABBB).
Phrase-structure grammar is based on recursion. It denotes an embedding of sentences in sentences. This
enables an unlimited extension of a language. The linguistic doctrine that recursion is the only trait which
differentiates human and animal communication and is currently under intense debate.