The prima facie unbounded nature of natural language, contrasted with the finite character of our memory and computational resources, is often taken to warrant a recursive language processing mechanism. The widely held distinction between an idealized infinite grammatical competence and the actual finite natural language performance provides further support for a recursive processor. In this paper, I argue that it is only necessary to postulate a recursive language mechanism insofar as the competence/performance distinction is upheld. However, I provide reasons for eschewing the latter and suggest that only data regarding observable linguistic behaviour ought to be used when modeling the human language mechanism. A connectionist model of language processing—the simple recurrent network proposed by Elman—is discussed as an example of a non-recursive alternative and I conclude that the computational power of such models promises to be sufficient to account for natural language behaviour.

Repetition of linguistic structure plays a role in both language comprehension and production. Previously encountered structures are processed faster, and speakers tend to reuse them in new utterances—a phenomenon known as structural priming. According to one well-established interpretation of structural priming, linguistic input activates an underlying mental representation based on constituents, a syntactic unit derived from rule-based grammars (e.g., [[he]NP [hears [a sound]NP]VP]S). Here we ask whether structural priming can occur for non-constituent parts-of-speech fragments, such as pronoun verb determiner (e.g., he hears a). Across two preregistered phrasal decision experiments, we show that structural priming can occur at the level of three-word parts-of-speech sequences and in the absence of constituents. Using corpus analysis, we further show that structural priming of non-constituents also occurs in real-life dialogue. These results imply that constituent structure is not a necessary prerequisite for structural priming and provide a challenge to contemporary approaches to grammar.

What is the relationship between cognitive theories of symbol grounding and philosophical theories of meaning? In this paper we argue that, although often considered to be fundamentally distinct, the two are actually very similar. Both set out to explain how non-referring atomic tokens or states of a system can require status as semantic primitives within that system. In view of this close relationship, we consider what attempts to solve these problems can gain from each other. W e argue that, at least presently, work on symbol grounding is not likely to have an impact on philosophical theories of meaning. On the other hand, we suggest that the symbol grounding theorists have a lot to learn from their philosophical counterparts. In particular, the former must address the problems that have been identified in attempting to formulate philosophical theories of reference.