**Chunks of Local Syntactic Dependencies Form Periodic Sequences, within and across 21 Languages**
Chia-Wen Lo* *1*, Mark Anderson*2*, Lorenzo Titone*1*, John T. Hale*3*, Lars Meyer*1,4*
*1* Language Cycles, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig & 04013, Germany. *2* SAMBA, Norwegian Computing Center, Oslo & 0373, Norway. *3* Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore & 21218, USA. *4* Clinic for Phoniatrics and Paediatric Audiology, University Hospital Münster, Münster & 48149, Germany. *lo@cbs.mpg.de
Abstract:
Our ability to combine words and bound morphemes defines the communicative potential of human language. But when exerting this ability on continuous speech, we are constrained by the instruments of our brain. Specifically, our brain processes both speech and text in a windowed manner rather than continuously. Here, autocorrelation analysis in 21 languages shows that chunks of multiple words follow each other at similar durations, when defining chunks as clusters of local syntactic dependencies, consistent with psycholinguistic research. This periodic pace of chunks may have evolved for human language to be processed well by the periodic electrophysiological activity of our brain—ensuring that one chunk of words that are densely connected by syntactic dependencies can always be processed within one cycle of electrophysiological activity.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/chiawenl/UD_chunker_autocorrelation
Citation:
Chia-Wen Lo, Mark Anderson, Lorenzo Titone, John T. Hale, Lars Meyer. (Under review). Chunks of Local Syntactic Dependencies Form Periodic Sequences, within and across 21 Languages. MPI-CBS.
