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different salience or prominence in processing and especially
imitation of language. For instance, children acquire sounds and
prosody before they acquire words.^35 Syntactic form—or the
actual ordering and combination of words—is least salient and
consequently least easy to imitate. There was a great deal of
research in psycholinguistics starting in the 1960s, none of
which has been refuted, about the way we remember the
meaning of a statement while we forget how the statement was
actually said.^36 In fact, in normal linguistic processing it appears
that loss of syntactic structure occurs within milliseconds,^37 even
in writing tasks.^38 Nonetheless, even though we do not
remember the word order for long, syntactic structures are very
real, albeit fragile and abstract. Again, a great deal of research
in psycholinguistics and linguistic theory (starting with Fodor
and Bever^39 ) demonstrates the reality of syntactic structures,
especially the edges of structures, like the beginnings and
endings of noun phrases or clauses, because the edges are where
most informative morphosyntactic elements appear, and also
where the phrasal head—the dominant function—is placed.
Therefore, the forensic computational linguistic approach focuses
primarily on syntax because syntax would be more difficult to
imitate than lexical choices or spelling and punctuation (the
graphic correlate of phonetics and prosody).
FROMKIN ET AL., supra note 32.
(^35) S. Katz-Gershon, Word Extraction in Infant and Adult Directed
Speech: Does Dialect Matter? (2007) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne
State Univ.) (on file with author).
(^36) Philip N. Johnson-Laird & Rosemary Stevenson, Memory for Syntax,
227 NATURE 412 (1970) (citing Jacqueline S. Sachs, Recognition Memory for
Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Connected Discourse, 2 PERCEPTION &
PSYCHOPHYSICS 437, 437 (1967)).
(^37) Id.
(^38) See Holly P. Branigan et al., Syntactic Priming in Written Production:
Evidence for Rapid Decay, 6 PSYCHONOMIC BULL. & REV. 635, 635–40
(1999).
(^39) Jerry A. Fodor & Thomas G. Bever, The Psychological Reality of
Linguistic Segments, 4 J. VERBAL LEARNING & VERBAL BEHAV. 414, 414–20
(1965).