Comment by jeffmcmahan

Yes, as usual, our pop science writer with a dim understanding of the issue quotes critics of the Chomskyan paradigm (the study aims to falsify Chomsky’s suspicion that a symbolic operation called “merge” gives humans a unique capacity for deep recursion) and for balance quotes other critics of the Chomskyan paradigm - and never do we hear from the syntacticians (who study recursive grammatical structure as a career).