When linguistic dogma rejects a neuroscientific hypothesis

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.