A commentary on "The now-or-never bottleneck: a fundamental constraint on language", by Christiansen and Chater (2016)

Abstract

In a recent article, Christiansen and Chater (2016) present a fundamental constraint on language, i.e. a now-or-never bottleneck that arises from our fleeting memory, and explore its implications, e.g., chunk-and-pass processing, outlining a framework that promises to unify different areas of research. Here we explore additional support for this constraint and suggest further connections from quantitative linguistics and information theory.

References in corpus (2)

• A stronger null hypothesis for crossing dependencies
• Compression and the origins of Zipf's law of abbreviation