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The Role of Language in Structure-Dependent Cognition

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Neural Mechanisms of Language

Part of the book series: Innovations in Cognitive Neuroscience ((Innovations Cogn.Neuroscience))

Abstract

The ability to construct an indefinite number of ideas by combining a finite set of elements in a hierarchically structured sequence is a signal characteristic of human cognition. To illustrate, consider the sentence The girl who kissed the boy closed the door. It is immediately clear to any proficient English speaker that the state of affairs described by this sentence is that the girl is doing the closing. This specific interpretation is as effortless as automatic, and if anybody interpreted it any differently it might be sufficient grounds for doubting her proficiency of the English language. Nonetheless, one might wonder why, for example, we do not interpret the noun phrase the boy as being the subject of the verb phrase closed the door. After all, the boy is linearly much more proximal to the verb phrase than is the girl. Furthermore, the sentence actually even contains the well-formed fragment […] the boy closed the door, in which, of course, it is the boy doing the closing. Yet, when we consider the full sentence, the relative linear proximity of its component elements does not appear to guide our interpretation. How is it then that we so effortlessly and automatically interpret the sentence above as describing a state of affairs in which a (certain) girl, who just so happens to have given a kiss to a (certain) boy, has closed the door? One explanation, which is perhaps the founding intuition of the modern study of language as a mental phenomenon, is that despite the fact that language is typically manifested as a temporally linear sequence of utterances, in our mind we spontaneously build a rich abstract hierarchical representation of how each discrete element within the sequence relates to every other element. It is the building of these abstract representations that allows us to assign meaning to strings of utterances. Although this ability is most prominently displayed in our use of natural language, it also characterizes several other aspects of human cognition such as logic reasoning, number and music cognition, action sequences and spatial relations, among others. As I will describe below, at least at an intuitive level, these seemingly distant domains of human cognition all appear to be organized at an abstract level and might therefore share, hidden behind a linear surface structure, the hierarchical and recursive features that are most commonly described by the syntactic trees built by linguists (see Fig. 5.1 for an example).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As described below, given that deductive reasoning is most often elicited by the means of verbal stimuli, it is trivial that linguistic processes are needed to apprehend the stimuli. What is under discussion here is whether linguistic processes play a role in deductive reasoning beyond the initial encoding of verbal materials.

  2. 2.

    It might be worth clarifying that so-called Mental Rules theories of deduction (e.g., Osherson and Falmagne 1975), despite being sometimes portrayed as language based (see Goel et al. 1998, 2000), might in fact be better understood as describing deductive inference as a “syntax-like,” algebraic, computation, rather than a linguistic one (cf., Monti et al. 2007).

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award. Parts of this work have appeared in Monti et al. (2009, 2012), and Monti and Osherson (2012).

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  1. Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Martin M. Monti

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Correspondence to Martin M. Monti .

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  1. Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts, USA

    Maria Mody

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Monti, M.M. (2017). The Role of Language in Structure-Dependent Cognition. In: Mody, M. (eds) Neural Mechanisms of Language. Innovations in Cognitive Neuroscience. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7325-5_5

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