Bookmark and Share

Get my free newsletter on entrepreneurship, science and technology


Alex Bäcker's Wiki / Syntactical-recursion

Alex Bäcker's Wiki

 

Syntactical-recursion

Page history last edited by Alex Backer, Ph.D. 11 mos ago
Reproduced from Polimeni and Reiss (2006) :
In a recent article, Hauser, Chomsky and Techumseh Fitch (2002) hypothesize
that syntactical recursion is a defining feature of Homo sapiens. In simple terms,
linguistic recursion is the ability to construct a phrase within a phrase indefinitely (only

limited by the constraints of memory) to create an almost limitless number of ideas.

 

I have long believed that what Hauser et al call syntactical recursion, which one might also call hierarchical statistics or hierarchical predictions, is a fundamental feature of intelligence, so I thought that the brief to-the-point summary above was worth reproducing.

 


 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.