December 27, 2012
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Neural Language Parsing
I love Wikipedia. As a kid, I used to read dead tree encyclopedias for fun, following “links” by opening up new volumes as articles referenced each other. It’s a lot cooler now, and the concept of printing out Wikipedia is bind moggling. Anyway, I stumbled on this article on “Garden Path Sentences“, not sure how, and found it fascinating. The idea the brain has a parser, which trots along until it finds an error or contradiction, then recurses back to reparse in light of the new data, is one I’d thought as a metaphor, but it seems to be an actual physical fact of our neural structure… there’s a specific, mapped, reaction when our brain gets a “parse fail” error and a reset of the pointer to the start of the sentence, now incorporating the new word, to determine if what was previously classed as, say, “past tense” should now be reclassed as “future tense”.
