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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Deep center-embedding constructions are extraordinarily difficult to process

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Processing difficulty is gradient and context-dependent, not binary; trained readers parse depth-3 embeddings with moderate effort given typographic or prosodic cues.
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    • 2.Fodor and Frazier's garden-path research shows parsing difficulty dissipates upon re-analysis, indicating temporary load rather than principled incomprehensibility.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Rarity of occurrence in corpora conflates performance limitations with competence constraints, a distinction Chomsky's generative framework explicitly warns against.
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    • 2.A construction's absence from natural usage cannot establish cognitive inaccessibility, since frequency reflects pragmatic and stylistic pressures independent of grammatical processing capacity.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Depth-3 center-embedded sentences such as 'Vehicles that engineers who car companies trust build crash every day' are semantically plausible yet practically incomprehensible
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    • 2.Such sentences virtually never occur even in writing
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