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Christiansen & Chater (C&C) argue that higher-level chunks preserve information from lower-level chunks albeit in a much impoverished form. However, they also suggest that there is no obligatory relationship between low-level chunks and high-level chunks. To support their claim, they cite the case of SF (cf. Ericsson et al. 1980), who could accurately recall as many as 79 digits after grouping them in locally meaningful units (e.g., historical dates and human ages). Moreover, they argue that the Now-or-Never bottleneck forbids broad parallelism in language at the expense of avoiding ambiguities (e.g., “garden path” sentences). In brief, C&C propose that chunks are only locally coherent and that their gist, however contradictory, is being safely kept track of at higher levels. Unfortunately, the authors remain silent about the mechanisms underlying higher-level representation formation.
C&C also declare themselves agnostic about the nature of chunks. Indeed, although there is ample psychological evidence for the existence of chunks in various types of experimental data, from pause durations in reading to naive sentence diagramming, chunks remain notoriously difficult to define. However, we have reasons to reject the possibility, which follows naturally from the Chunk-and-Pass framework, that chunks are arbitrary and may depend exclusively on memory limitations. To wit, chunks correspond most closely to intonational phrases (IPs) (cf. Gee & Grosjean 1983), which, in turn, are hard to capture by grammatical rules. For example, the sentence “This is the cat...