Necessity and plurality of neural dynamics under ROSE

Abstract

I am grateful to the authors of the commentary articles for identifying productive points of pressure for any neurocomputational account of syntax: whether semantic interpretation can proceed without a full syntactic derivation; how dynamical motifs are selected and coordinated; whether proposed mechanisms generalize across languages and modalities; how evolution may have repurposed older memory circuitry; and how neural dynamics distinguish types and tokens. Here, I clarify that ROSE is an architecture for implementing hierarchical syntactic computation, bringing with it no commitment that its full code is obligatory for every act of meaning construction. The commentaries suggest a number of compelling concrete extensions: task-dependent gating of S/E; factorized R/O subspaces; representation-relative rather than language-specific complexity measures; comparative tests of neural reuse; and occurrence-sensitive phase or state-space addresses. These thoughtful extensions sharpen the central aim of ROSE to formulate multiscale, falsifiable links between formal properties of language and neural dynamics.