The epicenter of linguistic behavior

Speaking, listening, reading, and reasoning all depend on common, fundamental aspects of linguistic structure. This common structure is defined by the grammar, and so Bever (1970) calls grammar ‘the epicenter of all language behavior’ in his pioneering study of how grammar and the structures it defines may relate to other cognitive abilities. Computational models with this perspective have become more sophisticated since 1970. While many fundamental questions remain open, a substantial, non-trivial consensus about the nature of linguistic structure has emerged, and a wide range of methods for computing that structure are well understood. Much less is established about how the structure or content of grammar may be grounded in other cognitive abilities, but here again there is a much better understanding of how these could be related, and some proposals are getting sophisticated enough for preliminary empirical assessments. The influence of language on normal human cognition is vast and varied. We hear, speak, read, write, notice clever turns of phrase, chant incantations, sing and dance to rhymes. The idea that all this activity is governed by just one, uniform cognitive mechanism is plainly a non-starter, and yet in all these activities the distinctively linguistic structure is largely shared. For Bever (1970), this common structure is the ‘epicenter of language’, the grammar, and the project of identifying its role in mental life has been a fundamental part of constructing “an experimental mentalism” (Fodor, Bever, and Garrett, 1974, p.xi). But in the past decades, besides all the expected vicissitudes of experimental science, this project