ABSTRACT
There are works in science that become important not only for the relevance of the empirical and theoretical findings they originally provide, but also because they come at a special moment and help the scientific community to disentangle the debate when things start to get involuted, and research paths tend to go in circles. The work presented by Pallier et al. in PNAS 1 certainly meets this special requirement: quantitative neuropsychological data are offered to support the hypothesis that words are combined into hierarchical structures (i.e., constituents) rather than being linearly organized. To arrive at such a conclusion, the authors provide evidence that a set of brain regions responds monotonically to the hierarchical constituent structure of sentences, thus shedding light on the cortical implementation of a central aspect of language, arguably the one marking the watershed between human and nonhuman communication codes. 2 The burden of proof against a hierarchical view of syntax becomes very heavy from now on.
