I happened to be reading Cummins (2000)
paper “’How does it work?’ vs. ‘What are the laws?’ Two conceptions of
psychological explanation”, when my Twitter feed announced that Chomsky was
right and we do have grammar in our heads after all. The Twitter buzz concerned
a new Nature Neuroscience paper by Ding and colleagues called “Cortical
tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech.” You can find it online here. Curious
whether I needed to completely overhaul my understanding of language, I tracked
down the paper and read it this morning. The method employed is sensible, the
results are fairly clear, the analyses seem legit (though I’m not a
neuroscientist). So, why am I not worried that everything I thought I knew
about language is wrong?
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