From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that offers one consistent information-theoretic account for both learning the regularities in the input and generalizing to new input. The model predicts that rule induction is an encoding mechanism gradually driven as a natural automatic reaction by the brain's sensitivity to the input complexity (entropy) interacting with the finite encoding power of the human brain (channel capacity). In two artificial grammar experiments with adults we probed the effect of input complexity on rule induction. Results showed that as the input becomes more complex, the tendency to infer abstract rules increases gradually.

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This chapter outlines a new approach to the investigation of aphasics' linguistic errors. The model represents a further development of ideas outlined in Avrutin (1999). It shows that damage to Broca's region diminishes the amount of resources necessary for conducting operations involving narrow syntax. This causes a slowdown in the process of speech production. Moreover, reduced power of this system (a direct consequence of diminished resources) may result in the situation where alternative systems become more powerful and therefore are used for the purposes of building information structure in comprehension or encoding a message. Impairment in Broca's aphasia is not limited to structures involving constituent movement (e.g., passive constructions, object relative clauses). Comprehension of pronouns and other determiners causes difficulties as well. Slow, effortful, telegraphic speech is characteristic of the same patients who demonstrate problems with comprehension of certain elements.

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Studies of agrammatic Broca's aphasia reveal a diverging pattern of performance in the comprehension of reflexive elements: offline, performance seems unimpaired, whereas online—and in contrast to both matching controls and Wernicke's patients—no antecedent reactivation is observed at the reflexive. Here we propose that this difference characterizes the agrammatic comprehension deficit as a result of slower-than-normal syntactic structure formation. To test this characterization, the comprehension of three Dutch agrammatic patients and matching control participants was investigated utilizing the cross-modal lexical decision (CMLD) interference task. Two types of reflexive-antecedent dependencies were tested, which have already been shown to exert distinct processing demands on the comprehension system as a function of the level at which the dependency was formed. Our hypothesis predicts that if the agrammatic system has a processing limitation such that syntactic structure is built in a protracted manner, this limitation will be reflected in delayed interpretation. Confirming previous findings, the Dutch patients show an effect of distinct processing demands for the two types of reflexive-antecedent dependencies but with a temporal delay. We argue that this delayed syntactic structure formation is the result of limited processing capacity that specifically affects the syntactic system

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