Watson Stuart K, Burkart Judith M, Schapiro Steven J, Lambeth Susan P, Mueller Jutta L, Townsend Simon W
Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution, Zurich, Switzerland.
Sci Adv. 2021 Jul 21;7(30). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj1517. Print 2021 Jul.
Rawski revisit our recent findings suggesting the latent ability to process nonadjacent dependencies ("Non-ADs") in monkeys and apes. Specifically, the authors question the relevance of our findings for the evolution of human syntax. We argue that (i) these conclusions hinge upon an assumption that language processing is necessarily hierarchical, which remains an open question, and (ii) our goal was to probe the foundational cognitive mechanisms facilitating the processing of syntactic Non-ADs-namely, the ability to recognize predictive relationships in the input.
罗斯基重新审视了我们最近的研究发现，这些发现表明猴子和猿类具有处理非相邻依存关系（“非ADs”）的潜在能力。具体而言，作者质疑我们的发现与人类句法进化的相关性。我们认为：（i）这些结论取决于一个假设，即语言处理必然是层次化的，而这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题；（ii）我们的目标是探究促进句法非ADs处理的基础认知机制——即识别输入中预测关系的能力。
