AIIC AI Intelligence Centre

SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

A Data-free Universal Prior over Syntactic Structures

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 15, 2026 · UTC

Probability is fundamental to theories of language comprehension, production, acquisition, and evolution, as well as to large language models. Existing theories estimate the probability of syntactic structures from language-specific data. Whether part of this probability structure can arise independently of language-specific experience remains unknown. Here I show that a universal prior over syntactic structures emerges from a cognitively motivated model of incremental language production, in which words are progressively integrated into syntactic structure through network growth. The resultin

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType
paper
region
Global

Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T09:01:24.920Z. This is not the publication date.