Against cross-linguistic uniformity in the neurocognition of language: Ina Bornkessel* and Matthias Schlesewsky** One of the central aims of linguistic science is to model cross-linguistic unity and diversity in the human language faculty. However, standard assumptions regarding the relative weighting of these two key notions differ substantially across linguistic subdisciplines. Thus, theorising in psycho- and neurolinguistics has traditionally followed the assumption of Chomskyan generative grammar in the strongest sense, thereby typically leading to the postulation of a unitary neurocognitive language processing system across languages. By contrast, the striking differences between languages revealed by research in language typology appear difficult to reconcile with the assumption that all languages are understood in a virtually identical way. A new research programme, entitled “neurotypology”, attempts to bridge this gap between typology and neurolinguistics by investigating more closely at which level of abstraction cross-linguistic similarities in the neurocognition of language should be situated. In this talk, we will provide an empirical motivation for such an approach, by showing that processing mechanisms subserving similar underlying functions in different languages (e.g. argument hierarchy construction) may differ considerably from language to language depending on individual linguistic properties. Furthermore, we will show which model theoretic assumptions can be drawn from experimental findings of this type and, in turn, which cross-linguistic predictions for sentence comprehension may be derived from them. |