ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews recent research on hierarchical structure in sentence processing. Frank challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that hierarchical structure is basic to human language. Drawing from evidence related to psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience, they claim that sequential structure is more fundamental to language use than hierarchical structure. The chapter discusses the phenomenon called "agreement attraction", which cite as indicating most clearly that sequential information plays a crucial role in real-time language use. The phenomenon of agreement attraction is commonly observed in production and often yields an illusion of grammaticality in comprehension. Agreement attraction provides us with an important source of information about how linguistic knowledge interacts with language processing. The chapter explains structure dependence in relation to the brain. It also reviews the results of, which replicate the involvement of Broca's area in acquiring new linguistic knowledge based on structure dependence but in a way immune to the mentioned possible criticisms.
