From structure to sequence: A multinomial processing tree model of syntactic encoding
Jeremy D. Yeaton, Grant M. Walker, Danielle Fahey, William Matchin, Julius Fridriksson, Gregory Hickok · 2026
Read From structure to sequence: A multinomial processing tree model of syntactic encoding by Jeremy D. Yeaton, Grant M. Walker, Danielle Fahey, William Matchin, Julius Fridriksson, Gregory Hickok (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13421263.txt.
Description
Jeremy D. Yeaton and five colleagues present, in a 2026 paper, the first computational version of a classic two-stage account of how speakers build sentences. The account holds that a speaker first assembles a hierarchical sentence structure, then flattens it into a word sequence ready to say aloud.
Their multinomial processing tree model was fitted to speech samples from people with aphasia, whose error patterns reveal where production breaks down. Estimated ability at each stage matched observed error rates, and the stages mapped onto different brain areas: structure building to temporal and parietal regions, flattening to lower frontal regions. The authors argue the results support a real separation between the two stages of grammatical encoding.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jeremy D. Yeaton, Grant M. Walker, Danielle Fahey, William Matchin, Julius Fridriksson, Gregory Hickok |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 46 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |