ABSTRACT
In grammatical production, ventral pathways of the brain create binary sets (predications) by a merge procedure, and dorsal pathways can stack those merge sets into hierarchical sets that map into tree structures for linear externalization. In parsing, the brain tracks information in a way that can be illustrated with two pushdown stacks—a 4-item word stack and a 2-item topic stack. A child’s working memory may be even smaller, so adults accommodate in various ways, such as allowing fewer words to intervene between a pronoun and its antecedent. To train children’s parsing abilities, authors of children’s books can present challenging structures with mismatched merge pairs, confusing pronoun references, and unusual sentence structures. They can also draw specific attention to the positions of I (Inflection, with tense or agreement) and C (complementizer, the target for moving whatever is in I for question formation). Syntactic growth is not a function of drill and repetition, but of exploration triggered by delightful (and masterful) surprise.
