Author summary
Human language is a fundamental biological signal with computational properties that differ from other perception-action systems: hierarchical relationships between sounds, words, phrases, and sentences and the unbounded ability to combine smaller units into larger ones, resulting in a “discrete infinity” of expressions. These properties have long made language hard to account for from a biological systems perspective and within models of cognition. We argue that a single computational mechanism—using time to encode hierarchy—can satisfy the computational requirements of language, in addition to those of other cognitive functions.
(A mechanism for the cortical computation of hierarchical linguistic structure)
An short article about the above study: Brainwaves Encode the Grammar of Human Language