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How the brain understands grammar

22.12.2015

The outstanding modern linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 50s of the last century suggested that the ability to speak any language is innate in us. According to this hypothesis, the sequences of words in grammatically correct phrases correspond to some abstract structures that exist in our minds, so that we can recognize a linguistic expression, even if it is completely meaningless in content, for example: "Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously." But there is also an opposite explanation, which consists in the fact that the language is formed from the constant comparison of sounding words with their place in the phrase - this is how grammatical structures are realized. It is assumed that in this case our ideas about how to build a phrase are taken from experience.

Neuroscientists from New York University, Peking University and the Max Planck Society set out to find out experimentally what happens in the brain when learning linguistic units. The participants of the experiment listened to sentences in English and Northern Chinese (that is, those who knew English listened to English, and those who knew Chinese listened to Chinese), and words, phrases and sentences were pronounced to them without intonational prompts (without rising and falling tone, etc.) and in an arbitrary okay. That is, for example, a person randomly listened to ordinary phrases, like "Coffee drives away sleep", some strange statements like "Pink doll offends a girl", and just a set of words, as if organized into a sentence, for example "wake pink jelly eggs" . In addition, in each case, the words were pronounced at regular intervals.

The goal of the researchers was to see how the brain distinguishes between different levels of language organization (that is, how it distinguishes sequences of words from phrases, and both from sentences) without intonation and other clues. Brain activity was monitored using magnetic encephalography, when changes in the magnetic fields generated by neuronal structures are recorded, and electrocorticography, when electrical activity is recorded directly on the cerebral cortex (such a procedure, of course, is possible only with patients who are already undergoing brain surgery) . In an article in Nature Neuroscience, the authors write that they managed to identify activities associated with words, their combinations and sentences, and all three levels of language organization were analyzed by the nervous system simultaneously. And all this happened, we emphasize again, without clues in the form of intonation or uneven pronunciation of words in time, which could give out some kind of connection between them.

The results confirm Chomsky's hypothesis that the language we hear fits into the grammatical cells prepared for it, which is equally true for languages as far apart as Chinese and English. (Note that this is not about the meaning of words, not about the fact that some particular combination of sounds corresponds to some object or phenomenon, but about the grammatical component of the language.) Although, most likely, new data will be checked more than once and recheck - the hypothesis of "innate grammar", despite its fame, is still considered by many to be "too original".

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