title: Memory limitations and chunking are variable and cannot explain language structure.
abstract: Both the Now-or-Never bottleneck and the chunking mechanisms hypothesized to cope with it are more variable than Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest. These constructs are, therefore, too weak to support C&C's claims for the nature of language. Key aspects of the hierarchical nature of language instead arise from the nature of sequencing of subgoals during utterance planning in language production.
authors: Department of Psychology,University of Wisconsin-Madison,Madison,WI 53706.mcmacdonald@wisc.eduhttp://lcnl.wisc.edu/people/mcm/
authors: Maryellen C
authors: MC
authors: MacDonald
mesh_terms: D007802:Language; D008568:Memory