{"content":[{"text":"Syntax and the Brain","bbox":{"left":0.658921,"top":0.047029,"width":0.16499600000000003,"height":0.016779000000000002}},{"text":"Syntax and the Brain","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.092483,"width":0.17812499999999998,"height":0.016779000000000002}},{"text":"Jon Sprouse \n Department of Cognitive Sciences \n University of California, Irvine","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.127332,"width":0.269531,"height":0.05162699999999998}},{"text":"Ellen F. Lau \n Department of Linguistics \n University of Maryland","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.197029,"width":0.20583600000000002,"height":0.05162699999999998}},{"text":"1. The role of syntactic theory in a cognitive neuroscience of syntax","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.283998,"width":0.558739,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"Marr (1982:19-29) argued that a complete description of any information processing device, \n including the human brain, will necessarily involve three levels of description: the computational \n level, the algorithmic level, and the implementational level. The computational level can best be \n described as an answer to the question “what problem is being solved by the device?” (and to \n some extent “why does the problem have the form that it does?”). The algorithmic level is a \n description of the specific operations necessary to solve the problem. And the implementational \n level is a description of how those operations are implemented in the hardware of the device \n itself. Although this partitioning of the problem into three neat levels of analysis can be abused \n (see Phillips and Lewis 2010 for discussion), it also provides a good starting point for \n understanding the relationship between syntactic theory, the theory of sentence processing within \n psycholinguistics, and the neural implementation of sentence processing within neurolinguistics. \n Therefore we will begin our discussion with Marr’s three levels and how they map to the \n cognitive neuroscience of sentences.","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.318847,"width":0.763379,"height":0.22587000000000002}},{"text":"1.1 The computational level – syntactic theory","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.562786,"width":0.36426200000000003,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"Marr famously used a cash register to illustrate the three levels, so it seems appropriate to \n continue the tradition. The computational theory of a cash register (i.e. the problem that a cash \n register must solve) is the tallying of the cost of purchasing multiple items from a store, or more \n abstractly, the theory of addition. The properties of addition are familiar from arithmetic: (i) the \n order of addition for two numbers has no effect on the final sum (commutativity), (ii) the \n grouping of three or more items into pairs prior to addition also has no effect on the final sum \n (associativity), (iii) the addition of zero to a number has no effect on the number (identity), (iv) \n and the addition of a number and its inverse results in zero. As Marr (1982: 22) stated, “these \n properties are part of the fundamental theory of addition”, which means that “they are true no \n matter how the numbers are written… and no matter how the addition is executed.” In many \n ways, syntactic theory is the computational theory of the “human sentence processor”, as \n syntactic theory seeks to describe the fundamental properties of the sentences that are the input \n to comprehension and the output of production – properties that are true of sentences no matter \n how they are actually constructed during processing. However, as we will see shortly, the three \n levels are highly interactive, and the difficulties inherent in studying the human brain mean that \n it is impossible to completely isolate the computational properties of sentences from the \n algorithmic and implementational properties the same way that one can with a cash register.","bbox":{"left":0.118039,"top":0.597635,"width":0.7536539999999999,"height":0.295566}},{"text":"1","bbox":{"left":0.872941,"top":0.938847,"width":0.009804000000000035,"height":0.01677899999999999}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}