The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language

Abstract

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this "Now-or-Never" bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must "eagerly" recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with "Right-First-Time"; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is "Chunk-and-Pass" processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution.

The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations

“…However, in the case of large quantities of sequential data, where all items may be equally important, proximity of repeated occurrences in time and frequency of recurrence are the best first-resort tests of meaningfulness. The selective pressure of language in the direction of smaller buffer sizes and moderate fixation rates may explain why people are not better at memorizing sequential data verbatim (58), which would require larger buffer sizes and more rapid fixation.…”

“…[Recall our earlier discussion of Christiansen and Chater's memory bottleneck (58).] We assume that a larger buffer that can accommodate more data can evolve, but whether or not it will be adaptive depends on the kind of computations needed to process the data in the buffer.…”

Cognitive predictors of shallow-orthography spelling speed and accuracy in 6th grade children

“…Struggling to spell a word-regardless of whether the word is then spelled correctly-risks damage to higher level, conceptual, rhetorical or even syntactic structures in the text. Language processing operates under a stringent "now-or-never" constraint (Christiansen & Chater, 2016). If spelling is attention demanding, and therefore draws processing resources away from higher-level processes, the writer may, in a literal sense, forget what they were going to say.…”

Toward a Unified Theory of the I-R Model (Part 1)

“…Such duality is characteristic of all perceptual coding and recoding and thus always multi-representational to ensure the accuracy of signal acquisition (Christiansen & Chater, 2015). Because the melodic parametric scale is registrally triplex in nature, any reversal of registral direction always entails the activation of an implication in the reversed direction (whether down, up, or lateral).…”

“…The goal-note of the third degree is stable but slightly less so than the fifth degree). Structural tones, in other words, are ''lossy'' cognitive compressions recoding and integrating lower-level detail (Christiansen & Chater, 2015).…”