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Abstract
A simple change to a cognitive system at Marr’s computational level may entail complex changes at the other levels of description of the system. The implementational level complexity of a change, rather than its computational level complexity, may be more closely related to the plausibility of a discrete evolutionary event causing that change. Thus the formal complexity of a change at the computational level may not be a good guide to the plausibility of an evolutionary event introducing that change. For example, while the Minimalist Program’s Merge is a simple formal operation (Berwick & Chomsky, 2016), the computational mechanisms required to implement the language it generates (e.g., to parse the language) may be considerably more complex. This has implications for the theory of grammar: theories of grammar which involve several kinds of syntactic operations may be no less evolutionarily plausible than a theory of grammar that involves only one. A deeper understanding of human language at the algorithmic and implementational levels could strengthen Minimalist Program’s account of the evolution of language.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 171-174 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | Psychonomic Bulletin and Review |
Volume | 24 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2017 |
Keywords
- evolution
- language
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Dive into the research topics of 'Marr's levels and the minimalist program'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Improved syntactic and semantic analysis for natural language processing
Johnson, M. & Steedman, M.
30/06/16 → 31/12/21
Project: Research