Learning nonadjacent dependencies

International audienceNonadjacent dependencies are present whenevera relation exists between two events, A and C,irrespective of the intervening events. This structure isoften referred to as AXC, where X stands for a variableevent that is statistically independent from both A andC. An example of nonadjacent dependencies is therelationship between auxiliaries and inflectionalmorphemes, as in “is writing” in English, which occursirrespective of the verb stem. The mastery of this kindof structure in the language area has been endowedwith major theoretical implications in a Chomskyanperspective, and as a consequence, most research hasbeen carried out in the language domain. However, it isworth pointing out that capturing the relationshipsbetween distant events is essential in many othersituations. As claimed by Turk-Browne et al. (2005),“people are constantly bombarded with noise in spaceand time that needs to be segregated in order to extracta coherent representation of the world, and peoplerarely encounter a sequence of relevant stimuli withoutany interruptions” (p. 562)