Understanding each other using language ought to be all but impossible. During a normal conversation, we’re bombarded by more than 300 syllables per minute—yet the auditory trace disappears within a tenth of a second and our memory for sequences of sounds is incredibly short-lived. Even so, we are blissfully unaware of this ‘Now-or-Never Bottleneck’ when talking in our native language—it all seems so natural and easy. But when faced with an unfamiliar language, the mindboggling nature of the auditory deluge that is fluent speech suddenly becomes all too apparent.
In the CSL Lab, we have shown through theoretical and empirical work that the basic memory process of “chunking” is key to the brain’s ability to deal with this onslaught of language. To get an intuitive feel for how chunking works, compare the difficulty of recalling a string of 10 random letters from memory, ‘l h p a e i c p r a,’ with the same 10 letters reordered so that they can be chunked into two words ‘a p p l e c h a i r.’ However, chunking must occur straightaway, grouping together and making sense of linguistic material as soon as it is encountered, or new input will quickly overwrite the old. Of course, such chunking requires a lot of practice, making language acquisition a lot like skill learning.
Representative Publications
Contreras Kallens & Christiansen, M.H. (2022). Models of language and multiword expressions. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5:781962.
Jolsvai, H., McCauley, S.M. & Christiansen, M.H. (2020). Meaningfulness beats frequency in multiword chunk processing. Cognitive Science, 44, e12885.
McCauley, S.M., Isbilen, E.S. & Christiansen, M.H. (2017). Chunking ability shapes sentence processing at multiple levels of abstraction. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E.J. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society(pp. 2681-2686). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Arnon, I., McCauley, S.M. & Christiansen, M.H. (2017). Digging up the building blocks of language: Age-of-acquisition effects for multiword phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 92, 12(1): e0168532.
Christiansen, M.H. & Chater, N. (2016). The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 39, e62