earticle

영어

The core area of the computational system designed in a recent version of Minimalist Program consists only of lexicon and Merge. All other notions are attributed to conditions on interfaces, which are restricted by performance. Among them is phase, a syntactic domain, which bars syntactic relations from outside. From the psycholinguistic view, phase can be regarded as a parsing domain, such that it is required to be as small as possible to minimize computational loads. In this paper, we explore the possibility that processing of language can be characterized in a way that the 'mental' derivation converges. Based on the psychological and neurobiological evidence that the language system continues to change as it progresses toward older age, the mental derivation is constrained by cognitive factors in the life span, such as age-based memory span and capacity.