The Present and Future of Parallel Architectures of Language and Cognition

The suite of capacities constituting language involves diverse mental representations, from modality-specific information to levels of formal structure and meaning. In the cognitive science of language, a long-standing puzzle is how these representations “hang together” in an architecture that explains the widest possible range of facts about language. Parallelism is the general hypothesis that correlations exist between representations in the language system (e.g., between syntactic structure and compositional meaning) as well as within the mind (e.g., between word meaning and world knowledge). These correlations are mediated by systems of interfaces, but are always only partial and exhibit varying degrees of systematicity: each type of representation is functionally autonomous, that is, constructed according to specific principles, in addition to simple combinatorial mechanisms that apply across the system. This Topic explores new directions in developing or engaging with this hypothesis, in relation to open issues in several areas of current research in linguistics and cognitive brain science.