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📡 Now available for broadcast on PRX

Are you building sentences like an architect—nested grammatical trees and clean constituents? Or are you laying down the next available brick, relying on linear probability-driven chunks that “shouldn’t” exist as units at all?

In this Deep Dive, we unpack new evidence that the brain represents certain non-hierarchical language structures (like VERB + PREPOSITION + DETERMINER: “sat on the”) as real cognitive objects. The findings converge across priming experiments, eye-tracked reading, and natural conversation data—suggesting that everyday speech is often optimized for speed under the “now-or-never bottleneck.”

We end with the provocative mirror this holds up to AI: if humans often speak by surfing probability, what does that mean for how we judge next-word prediction models?

References

Evidence for the representation of non-hierarchical structures in language

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