Squeezing through the Now-or-Never Bottleneck: The Role of Chunking in Language Learning and Processing

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

Language happens in the here-and-now. During normal linguistic interaction, we are faced with an immense challenge by the combined effects of rapid input, short-lived sensory memory, and severely limited sequence memory. How then can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? I argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must incrementally compress and recode the linguistic input as rapidly as possible before it is gone. As a consequence, incoming language incrementally gets recoded into chunks at increasingly more abstract levels of linguistic representation, from phonemes and syllables to multiword sequences and beyond. To illustrate, I present results from behavioral experiments, highlighting the key role of chunking in language learning and processing of multiword sequences. One study demonstrates the foundational impact of early acquired multiword chunks on language processing. Just like the facilitatory effects on processing of early acquired individual words, we found that multiword chunks that were acquired early in life are also processed faster in adulthood. Another study shows how meaning influences how we process multiword chunks. Whereas previous work has shown that frequency affects the processing of multiword sequences, we discovered that the meaningfulness of a multiword chunk has an even stronger effect. I conclude that the immediacy of language processing provides a critical constraint on accounts of language learning and processing, implying that acquisition fundamentally involves learning to chunk the input as quickly as possible in the service of language processing, rather than inducing a grammar.