Grammatical Processing Using the Mechanisms of Physical Inference.

摘要

Although there is considerable evidence that humans use the same mechanisms for linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition, the thesis of linguistic modularity will remain plausible so long as well-established formal properties of syntax remain unexplained in terms of domain-general cognitive mechanisms. This paper presents several dualities between the formal structure of syntax and cognitive structures used to represent the physical world. These dualities are used to construct a cognitive model of syntactic parsing that uses only the mechanisms required for infant physical reasoning. The model demonstrates how a formal syntactic constraint, the c-command condition on binding, can be explained by a cognitive process used in physical reasoning. Several consequences for language development and the doctrine of linguistic modularity are considered.