Chapter 13 observes how representative theories of sentence processing costs fare in accounting for the relative difficulties among Kaqchikel sentences with different word orders. The relative processing costs associated with Kaqchikel transitive sentences with the four different word orders are correctly predicted by the Hierarchical Distance Hypothesis, whereas the relative processing costs associated with the corresponding four transitive constructions in Japanese are correctly predicted by the Linear Distance Hypothesis. However, the relative processing costs in these languages are also consistent with the assumption that they are shaped by the combined effects of the three factors: production frequency, linear distance, and hierarchical distance, suggesting the cognitive uniformity of the human parser.

This chapter looks back to the pioneering studies that prefigured the emergence of cognitive science, subsequently converging into this new interdisciplinary field in the late 1970s. The first section addresses a key turning point in psychology. Whereas behaviorism holds that all explicit behaviors are the product of conditioning, it became clear that animals can manipulate representations of the environment to solve complex problems without reinforcement. The second section introduces the Turing machine developed by Turing in the 1930s, illustrating that purely mechanical procedures can process information algorithmically. The idea of a computable machine contributed to the birth of computer science and provided a model for thinking about how the mind processes information. Chomsky's transformational grammar offers a classic example of a computable model of how complex sentences convey information as a function of basic syntax rules. Finally, Miller and Broadbent's findings on attention support applying the information-processing model in psychology. These pioneering researchers were the first to lay out some of what were to be the basic concepts of cognitive science.

Chapter 5 examines syntax, how sentences and phrases are built. It explores the relation between structure and meaning, showing how structure allows us to clarify ambiguity. Readers see how sentences are made up of phrases that in turn are made up of different words. These words belong to specific categories, with the category of the phrase determined by its head. The chapter explains the distinction between lexical and functional categories and presents the two basic processes for building sentences: Merge and move. Readers explore and practice the representation of sentence structure with tree diagrams. They are presented with a template for the representation of structure and shown how to use trees to indicate the difference between complements and adjuncts, and how the tree must represent not only word order but also how different phrases relate to each other. Tense is presented as the head of the sentence, with the verb phrase as its complement. In a parallel fashion, the determiner is presented as the head of the determiner phrase, with the noun phrase as its complement. Different structures such as questions, passives, and relative clauses are introduced and practiced. An appendix details step-by-step how to build syntactic trees.

In this chapter we attempt to separate the communal and the individual levels of language representation and explore how linguistic regularities emerge at each of them. We sample one communal and ten individual corpora of language use from the same ELF environment and examine to what extent syntactic structure, priming and chunking influence linguistic choice in each corpus by looking at the variation between contracted and full forms (it is/it’s). We find clear differences in how these three factors work across the corpora and attempt to interpret them in relation to the properties of individual languages, language change and the role of ELF.

This chapter provides an introduction to syntactic structure and how it is represented by tree diagrams. It begins (2.1) with an account of the Merge operation by which words can be combined together to form phrases, and phrases combined together to form clauses. It then goes on to examine the nature of heads, complements and specifiers (2.2), and the nature of projections (2.3). Next (2.4), it outlines eight ways of testing syntactic structure, before turning to look at how hierarchical structure (and the relation c-command) plays a central role in the description of phenomena like the licensing of polarity items (2.5) and the binding of anaphors (2.6). It also briefly touches on the possibility of developing a theory of bare phrase structure, and of treating syntactic structures as inherently unordered, with linearisation taking place in the phonological component. The chapter concludes with a summary (2.7), and a set of bibliographical notes (2.8). Accompanying free-to-download materials include a Workbook for students, and an Answerbook and set of PowerPoints for teachers: each of these contain a separate set of materials for each core section of the chapter.