The Now-or-Never bottleneck
A fundamental constraint on language
Datos Bibliográficos
| ID | 23344978 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Morten H Christiansen (0000-0002-3850-0655, Haskins Laboratories), Nick Chater (0000-0002-9745-0686, University of Warwick) |
| Año | 2016 |
| Volumen | 39 |
| Páginas | e62-e62 |
| Fecha de publicación | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sí |
| Open Access | Sí |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Revista | Behavioral and Brain Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores de la revista | ISSN: 0140-525X • E-ISSN: 1469-1825 |
| Editorial | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0140525x1500031x |
| PMID | 25869618 |
| OpenAlex | W2064304610 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Citas recibidas | 133 |
| Referencias citadas | 294 |
Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution.
Bottleneck · Cognitive science · Constraint (computer-aided design) · Geometry · Programming language · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Mathematics · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
The evolution of hierarchical structure building capacity for language and music
The Expectancy Dynamics of Anti-Tonal Twelve-Tone Rows
Second Language Acquisition, world Englishes, and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)
Long-lasting gradient activation of referents during spoken language processing
How top-down processing enhances comprehension of noise-vocoded speech
The effects of genre on dependency distance and dependency direction
A Simple Explanation for Harmonic Word Order
The effects of chunk reading strategy training on the word chunking skills of L1-Japanese English learners
Listening Errors at Chunk Level in The Case of Vietnamese University Learners of English as a Foreign Language
Autism, constructionism, and nativism
NP recursion over time
Statistical learning research
Predict and redirect
Linear Unit Grammar—A Real‐Time Grammar
Turn-taking in Human Communication – Origins and Implications for Language Processing
Multimodal Language Processing in Human Communication
Lossy‐Context Surprisal
Dependency distance
Shared Minds
Four decades of research on multiword expressions
Child-Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager-Farmer Population
Language input and outcome variation as a test of theory plausibility
Chunking words into multi-word expressions
A lexical network approach to second language development
A Suite of LMs Comprehend Puzzle Statements as Well or Better Than Humans
Manipulative Shallow Processing Induced by Presuppositions and Topics
Inferential Reading Skills in High School
Language as shaped by the environment
Chunking up speech in real time
Rules as Resources
Processing Factors Constrain Word-Order Variation in German
Register as a source of non-equivalent contracted constructions
Recursion in programs, thought, and language
Look at that
Is a Contradiction Between Arguments Less Likely to be Noticed When They are Implicit? An Experimental Case Study
Production without rules
Morphemes as letter chunks
The Associations Between Music Training, Musical Working Memory, and Visuospatial Working Memory
Learning and Recalling Melodies
The process-disruption hypothesis
Recursion beyond language
Improvised music follows human language quantitative properties to optimize music processing
The processing advantage of multiword sequences
Presupposition
Chunk reading strategy training improves multiword processing by Japanese English learners
The Position and the Punctuation of English Adverbial When ‐Clauses
Beyond linear order
The psychophysics of compositionality
Active causal structure learning in continuous time
Inhibition of lexical representations after violated semantic predictions
Does short-term memory develop
Comparing cross-situational word learning, retention, and generalisation in children with autism and typical development
Children's narrow learning bottleneck accelerates the emergence of statistical properties of language
The channel capacity of multilevel linguistic features constrains speech comprehension
Coarticulation facilitates lexical processing for toddlers with autism
Word predictability blurs the lines between production and comprehension
The effect of context on noisy-channel sentence comprehension
The role of iconicity and simultaneity for efficient communication
Using eye tracking to investigate failure to notice word transpositions in reading
Infant-directed speech does not always involve exaggerated vowel distinctions
A framework of literacy development and how AI can transform theory and practice
The extended present
A perceptual study of language chunking in Estonian
Aggression and disagreement in public communication
LLMs highlight the importance of interaction in human language learning
Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
Long English objects and short Chinese objects
Sam Browse. (2018) Cognitive Rhetoric
Grammar as a behavioral biometric
Evaluating “Meaningful Differences” in Learning and Communication Across SES Backgrounds
Heritage Languages
Implicit strategies aimed at persuading the audience in public debates
Sociopragmatic pronouns in Limburgian
The principle of no equivalence
Usage-based Grammar Induction from Minimal Cognitive Principles
On Learning Interpreted Languages with Recurrent Models
The multiword processing by low‐proficiency Japanese English learners
The persuasive and manipulative power of implicit communication
Mixing things up
Now, never, or coming soon
Recalling presupposed information
The role of feedback in implicit and explicit artificial grammar learning
Assessing the impact of conversational overlap in content on child language growth
Early language experience in a Papuan community
Relative contributions of predictive vs. associative processes to infant looking behavior during language comprehension
SES effects on the use of variation sets in child-directed speech
Effects of semantic plausibility, syntactic complexity and n-gram frequency on children's sentence repetition
Language as Mechanisms for Interaction
The role of competition and timeframes
How are exemplar representations transformed by encoding, retrieval, and explicit knowledge? A commentary on Ambridge (2020)
Against stored abstractions
Chunking ability predicts online sensitivity to L2 morphosyntax
Keep calm and move on
Argument marking reflects audience design effects
Memory retrieval as a pressure towards chunking in morphological inflection
A cross-linguistic computational study on one new idea per clause
Processing units of spoken language and the Mapping Problem
A Response to the Commentaries on Riches (2026)
Playing with language, creating complexity
The syntactic constraint on English auxiliary contraction
Approaches to Bootstrapping
Bayesian Rationality
Perception and communication.
Sentence Comprehension
Plans and the structure of behavior.
Using Language
Locality in Vowel Harmony
Lexical Priming
Presumptive Meanings
Constructions at Work
First Verbs
The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge
Auditory Scene Analysis
Relationship Thinking
Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language
Parallel Distributed Processing
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization
Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars
Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure
Probabilistic relations between words
The Representation of Verbs
Using prosody to avoid ambiguity
An integrated theory of language production and comprehension
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
The Faculty of Language
Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse
Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears
Redundancy and reduction
The magical number 4 in short-term memory
Becoming syntactic.
Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue
What the Eyes Say About Speaking
The kindergarten-path effect
Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence
Tracking the Time Course of Spoken Word Recognition Using Eye Movements
Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech
The P-chain
Semantic Influences On Parsing
Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension
From words to meaning
Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation
Rapid Expectation Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension
Framing sentences
The proactive brain
Evidence of Perspective-Taking Constraints in Children's On-Line Reference Resolution
Speed of word recognition and vocabulary knowledge in infancy predict cognitive and language outcomes in later childhood
The emergence of grammar
The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution.
Incrementality and Prediction in Human Sentence Processing
Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access.
Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication
The information available in brief visual presentations.
From monkey-like action recognition to human language
A probabilistic earley parser as a psycholinguistic model
Linguistic complexity
On language and connectionism
How to Grow a Mind
Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation
Interaction with context during human sentence processing
Sentence Perception as an Interactive Parallel Process
Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language
Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words
Language identification in the limit
Visual objects in context
Regularizing Unpredictable Variation
Reassessing working memory
Judgments of frequency and recognition memory in a multiple-trace memory model.
Anticipating Words and Their Gender
Subjacency as a processing phenomenon
A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward
Syntactic Priming in Immediate Recall of Sentences
The TRACE model of speech perception
Mommy and Me
Broken agreement
Understanding natural language
Attention to Action
Knowing a lot for one’s age
The sausage machine
Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication
Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue
Speech Perception as a Talker-Contingent Process
A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming.
Toward a cognitive psychology of syntax
Agreement Processes in Sentence Comprehension
The language bioprogram hypothesis
Expectation-based syntactic comprehension
Thinking ahead
Toward an instance theory of automatization.
Stored Word Sequences in Language Learning
Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction
A temporal ratio model of memory.
Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity
Do people use language production to make predictions during comprehension?
Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science
Logic and Conversation
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
On The Language Instinct
Rational choice and the structure of the environment.
How To Do Things With Words
Human behavior and the principle of least effort.
| Obras citantes distintas | 133 |
|---|---|
| Citas por año | 13,3 |
| Intervalo de citas | 2016 - 2026 (11) |
| Velocidad de citación | current |
| Altamente citado | Sí |
| Tipos de cita | Neutras: 120 |