This groundbreaking research from linguists challenges fundamental assumptions about how we construct and comprehend language. By examining how our brains connect words across sentence structures, the researchers reveal something remarkable: our cognitive processes might work differently than traditional linguistic theories suggest. The study explores how we link phrases and meanings, revealing unexpected pathways of mental connection that challenge decades of established thinking.
Understanding language isn’t merely an academic exercise – it’s a window into human cognition and connection. These insights help us recognize the sophisticated ways our minds navigate communication, bridging gaps between different ways of expressing complex ideas. By questioning established theories, researchers expand our understanding of how Indigenous, academic, and diverse communication strategies might intersect, offering profound insights into human potential and neural flexibility.
Abstract
We report the results of two acceptability judgment experiments on English materials, which were designed in order to help disentangle predictions of syntactic theories with transformations from nontransformational theories. The materials in these experiments were motivated from examples from Pickering & Barry (1991), who provided intuitive evidence that there is little processing cost for connecting a fronted prepositional phrase to its verb, even if it is the second postverbal argument of a verb in the declarative form. For example, the PP on which connects to the verb put in the sentence This is the saucer on which Mary put the cup into which she poured the milk. If there is a transformation of phrases from declarative structures to interrogative structures (as proposed in Chomsky (1957) and all versions of related theories since), then there is a long-distance connection between the fronted PP and its base position following the NP object, for example, the cup into which she poured the milk, which is not complete until the end of the sentence. In contrast, in a theory without transformations, the PP can be directly associated with its role-assigning verb put when this verb is encountered. If there is cost for processing making dependency connections that is proportional to their distances, then transformational theories predict a large processing cost for this kind of structure, relative to controls. In contrast, nontransformational theories predict no large cost. The results of the two rating experiments consistently supported the predictions of the non-transformational theories relative to those of the transformational theories. We argue that, in line with other current evidence, the nontransformational theories appear to better support the available empirical data.
