The Now-or-Never Processing Bottleneck
The Now-or-Never Processing Bottleneck
Chapter 4 discusses how the immediacy of language processing provides a fundamental constraint on theories of language acquisition and evolution. Language happens in the here-and-now. Because memory is fleeting, new material will rapidly obliterate previous material, creating a Now-or-Never bottleneck. To successfully deal with the continual deluge of linguistic information, the brain must compress and recode its input into “chunks” as rapidly as possible. It 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 to recover it. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here-and-now. This implies that language acquisition involves learning how to process linguistic structure, rather than inducing a grammar. Incoming language is recoded incrementally into chunks of increasing granularity, from sounds to constructions, and beyond. Importantly, several key properties of language follow naturally from this perspective, including the local nature of linguistic dependencies, the quasi-regular nature of linguistic structure, multiple levels of linguistic representation, and duality of patterning (i.e., that meaningful units are composed of smaller elements).
Keywords: Language processing, Now-or-Never bottleneck, Chunking, Predictive processing, Incremental processing, Linguistic dependencies, Linguistic structure, Levels of linguistic representation, Duality of patterning
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.