Work

False perspectives on human language: Why statistics needs linguistics

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language processing, vs. those who believe that discrete hierarchical structures implementing linguistic information such as syntactic ones are a better tool. In this paper, we show that this dichotomy is a false one. Relying on the fact that statistical measures can be defined on the basis of either structural or non-structural models, we provide empirical evidence that only models of surprisal that reflect syntactic structure are able to account for language regularities. One-sentence summary Language processing does not only rely on some statistical surface distributions, but it needs to be integrated with syntactic information.

Source: Frontiers in Language Sciences

DOI: 10.3389/flang.2023.1178932

Authors: Matteo Greco, Andrea Cometa, Fiorenzo Artoni, Robert Frank, Andrea Moro

Institutions: Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori di Pavia, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, University of Geneva, Yale University

Language: English

Topic: Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,125

Funders: Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca