What’s So Difficult About Center-Embedding?

For 50 years, syntacticians have attempted to explain why one center-embedded relative clause (RC) adds mildly to the effort of sentence processing (The rat [the cat killed] ate the malt), but adding a second RC pushes the cost sky-high (The rat [the cat [the dog chased] killed] ate the malt) - which doesn’t even sound like a grammatical sentence, though it is!

In collaboration with graduate students at CUNY, Janet Fodor has uncovered a novel explanation: A mismatch between syntactic structure (hierarchical) and prosodic structure (flat). It’s not syntax or prosody that makes center-embedding difficult; it’s just that these two modalities have conflicting structural needs.

Special thanks to: Stefanie Nickels, Esther Schott, Ben Macaulay, Danielle Ronkos, Tally Callahan, Tyler Peckenpaugh

• Janet Fodor, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, CUNY Graduate Center

• Liina Pylkkanen, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology, NYU; Co-Principal Investigator of the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, NYUAD
• Alec Marantz, Silver Professor of Linguistics and Psychology, NYU; Co-Principal Investigator of the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, NYUAD

In collaboration with