For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed
that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts
in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls.
A new Cornell study suggests language use is simpler than
they had thought.
Co-author Morten Christiansen, Cornell professor of
psychology and co-director of the Cornell Cognitive Science Program, and his
colleagues say that language is actually based on simpler sequential
structures, like clusters of beads on a string.