The innate ability of humans to learn the hierarchical structures in language that Noam Chomsky wrote about reflects the structure of the neocortex. In a 2002 paper he coauthored, Chomsky cites the attribute of “recursion” as accounting for the unique language faculty of the human species.4 Recursion, according to Chomsky, is the ability to put together small parts into a larger chunk, and then use that chunk as a part in yet another structure, and to continue this process iteratively. In this way we are able to build the elaborate structures of sentences and paragraphs from a limited set of
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