When linguistic dogma rejects a neuroscientific hypothesis
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Date
2023Author
Lo, Chia-Wen
Henke, Lena
Martorell, Jordi
Meyer, Lars
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Lo, CW., Henke, L., Martorell, J. et al. When linguistic dogma rejects a neuroscientific hypothesis. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 24, 725 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00738-1
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Abstract
Kazanina and Tavano argue that delta- band oscillations cannot be involved in multi-word or multi-morpheme chunking during language comprehension because the timing of syntactic structure is too variable (Kazanina, N. & Tavano, A. What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 24, 113–128 (2023))1. According to the authors, comprehension requires the formation of hierarchically organized non-adjacent dependencies between words or morphemes that arrive at variable points in time. Temporally regular chunking would break dependencies and disable the comprehension of compositional meaning.