The Economist, “Chunking”

September 20, 2010

Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, follows up on the latest On Language column about “chunking” and language learning.

BEN ZIMMER left his usual popular topics (the language of “Mad Men” and so forth) in his column this weekend to look at some linguistics—specifically, on “chunking“. According to Mr Zimmer’s read of the literature, kids learn language in bigger pieces than we think. We assume language is assembled in the brain primarily in word-word-word form, but instead it may come in more pre-assembled phrases than we have previously realised.

Read the rest here.

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