Jon Brennnan, Associate Professor of Linguistics, will present "Lessons learned while searching for syntax in the brain" on Friday, March 11, at 4 pm via Zoom.

ABSTRACT

“[T]here is absolutely no mapping to date that we understand in even the most vague sense.” So writes David Poeppel in 2012 about the connection between Linguistics and neurobiology. I discuss our attempts to meet this challenge in the domain of syntax and give some reasons to be (slightly) optimistic. This optimism is underwritten by the hard lessons learned over the last decade of research by ourselves and others that have forced us to (i) confront that the term “syntax” does not neatly map to neurobiology, (ii) reconcile apparently competing theoretical frameworks for memory and prediction, and (iii) carefully tease apart the multifaceted linguistic causes of neural effects that we measure in the lab.