137: Are Trees Real? (with Yngwie Nielsen and Morten Christiansen)

What goes on in our minds when we construct an utterance? Linguists often use syntax trees to represent the structure of sentences, but are they psychologically real? Yngwie Nielsen and Dr Morten Christiansen have found evidence for something else: we can recognise patterns in strings of words, even when they don't form coherent "treelets". They're giving us a walkthrough of their latest work.

Timestamps

00:00 Start

00:31 Introductions: Yngwie and Morten

05:19 Insights into linguistics communication

07:45 What are syntax trees?

09:13 Why linguists love syntax trees

14:15 Treelets vs chunks: Looking beyond hierarchical structure

17:46 Wanna and gonna: Words that cross treelet boundaries

22:43 How to prime someone

28:18 Priming in this experiment: People do recognise chunks

32:26 Are people just filling in the treelet blanks?