Shannon Versus Chomsky: Brain Potentials and the Syntax-Semantics Distinction

The N400 and the P600 are two patterns of electrical brain potentials which can sometimes be found when people read or hear unexpected words. They have been widely claimed to be the neurological correlates of semantic and syntactic anomalies, respectively, but evidence accumulated over the last decade has raised some serious doubts about that interpretation. In this paper, I first review some of this evidence and then present an alternative way to think about the issue. My suggestion is built on Shannon's concept of noisy-channel decoding by tables of typical sets, and it is thus fundamentally statistical in nature. I show that a proper application of Shannon's concepts to the reading process provides an interesting reinterpretation of our notion of "syntax," thus questioning some fundamental assumptions of linguistics.