ReviewFrontiers in psychology2015
The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Child first language and adult second language are both tied to general-purpose learning systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Pooled it
- Learning regularities in noise engages both neural predictive activity and representational changes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mind versus machine: can biological models of the mind inspire machine intelligence design?Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2026Article
- The recursive grammar of mental time travel.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Lessons learned in animal acoustic cognition through comparisons with humans.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Cartography: Innateness or Convergent Cultural Evolution?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Voice modulatory cues to structure across languages and species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Nonhuman rationality: a predictive coding perspective.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Cortical Tracking of Speech: Toward Collaboration between the Fields of Signal and Sentence Processing.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- "This is a Titanic song": the effect of familiarity on children's learning affective meaning in music.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- A Gestalt Theory Approach to Structure in Language.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Beyond input: Language learners produce novel relative clause types without exposure.Journal of cognitive psychology (Hove, England) · 2021Article
- How statistical learning interacts with the socioeconomic environment to shape children's language development.PloS one · 2021Article
- How does the brain learn environmental structure? Ten core principles for understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of statistical learning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- Distinct neural networks for detecting violations of adjacent versus nonadjacent sequential dependencies: An fMRI study.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2020Article
- Speed or Accuracy Instructions During Skill Learning do not Affect the Acquired Knowledge.Cerebral cortex communications · 2020Article
- Human Linguisticality and the Building Blocks of Languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Infinite Generation of Language Unreachable From a Stepwise Approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Constructing a Consensus on Language Evolution? Convergences and Differences Between Biolinguistic and Usage-Based Approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Under What Conditions Can Recursion Be Learned? Effects of Starting Small in Artificial Grammar Learning of Center-Embedded Structure.Cognitive science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking-perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities. Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language. Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure. Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.