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Memory limitations and chunking are variable and cannot explain language structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2016

Maryellen C. MacDonald
Maryellen C. MacDonald*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706. mcmacdonald@wisc.eduhttp://lcnl.wisc.edu/people/mcm/
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Abstract

Both the Now-or-Never bottleneck and the chunking mechanisms hypothesized to cope with it are more variable than Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest. These constructs are, therefore, too weak to support C&C's claims for the nature of language. Key aspects of the hierarchical nature of language instead arise from the nature of sequencing of subgoals during utterance planning in language production.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 39 , 2016 , e84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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