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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.edu http://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.

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

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