Chomsky was right, researchers find: We do have a 'grammar' in our head

Chomsky was right, researchers find: We do have a 'grammar' in our head

A team of neuroscientists has found new support for MIT linguist Noam Chomsky's decades-old theory that we possess an "internal grammar" that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases. "One of the foundational elements of Chomsky's work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language," explains David Poeppel, the study's senior researcher and a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology. "Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner—a process that reflects an 'internal grammar' mechanism."

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Anomalism said:

Chomsky was right, researchers find: We do have a 'grammar' in our head

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A pity the explanation does not do a comparison of languages with differing grammars and sentence structures.

Having come from 2 languages at the same time (my mom's and my dad's) and then learning a third while very young (my grandma's), I have often wondered about how our mind processes language.

It seems to me that the subject-verb-object structure with adjective and adverb modifiers either before or after, but usually before, is how our minds work.

We focus on a subject first, and also any specific characteristics of the subject which we notice (big, small, colors, etc.), then the action of the subject, and also any specific characteristics of the action (fast, slow, etc.), and then we throw in anything else noticeable into the predicate, also with any particular specific characteristics of the predicate.

"The big brown dog chased swiftly after the poor little white kitties !!!"

English in it's simplest form follows this.

German and Japanese oddly enough often save for the last the VERB.