The Crucial Role of Recursion Complexity in the Pedagogical AI Construction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61360/BoniCETR262020981005Keywords:
recursion, language thoughts, pedagogy, educational strategies, artificial intelligence, syntaxAbstract
Based on psycholinguistic and cognitive theories of recursive structures, the current research investigates the core differences between human recursive thought and large language models’ recursive text generation. The present paper focuses on the cognitive processing and acquisition preferences of recursive syntax. Previous studies on education in the artificial intelligence era mostly discussed the application effects or ethical risks. However, there remains a gap in the cognitive mechanisms of processing the underlying syntactical structures, which are crucial for both human languages and computational language. The current paper proposes that recursion is a core psychological tool for mediating high-level cognitive thoughts, instead of merely a syntactical structure. Furthermore, it probes into the cognitive constraints, processing strategies and obstacles to acquisition. In addition, it provides pedagogical suggestions for protecting learners’ recursive thinking abilities.
References
Bach, E., Brown, C., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (1986). Crossed and nested dependencies in German and Dutch: a psycholinguistic study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1(3), 249–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690968608404677
Bar-Hillel Y. (1953). On recursive definitions in empirical science. Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Philosophy, Brussels, 5, 160–165.
Blaubergs, M. S., & Braine, M. D. S. (1974). Short-term memory limitations on decoding self-embedded sentences. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102(4), 745–748. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036091
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2015). The language faculty that wasn't: A usage-based account of natural language recursion. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1182. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01182
Coolidge, F.L., Overmann, K.A. and Wynn, T. (2011), Recursion: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? WIREs Cognitive Science, 2(5), 547-554. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.131
Corballis, M. C. (2007). Recursion, language, and starlings. Cognitive Science, 31(4), 697–704. https://doi.org/10.1080/15326900701399947
Davis, F., & van Schijndel, M. (2020). Recurrent Neural Network Language Models Always Learn English-Like Relative Clause Attachment. ArXiv, abs/2005.00165.
Everett, D. L. (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: another look at the design features of human language. Current Anthropology, 46(4), 621–646. https://doi.org/10.1086/431506
Everett, D. L. (2007). Challenging Chomskyan linguistics: The case of Pirahã. Human Development, 50, 297-299. https://doi.org/10.1159/000109831
Fitch, W. T. (2010). Three meanings of “recursion”: Key distinctions for biolinguistics. In R. K. Larson, V. Déprez, & H. Yamakido (Eds.), The evolution of human languages: Biolinguistic perspectives (pp. 73–90). Cambridge University Press.
Fitch, W. T., Hauser, M. D., & Chomsky, N. (2005). The evolution of the language faculty: Clarification and implications. Cognition, 97(2), 179–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.05.005
Gentner, T. Q., Fenn, K. M., Margoliash, D., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2006). Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds. Nature, 440(7088), 1204–1207. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04675
Gotlieb Wilcox, E., Levy, R., & Futrell, R. (2019). Hierarchical Representation in Neural Language Models: Suppression and Recovery of Expectations. ArXiv, abs/1906.04068.
Hamilton, H. W., & Deese, J. (1971). Comprehensibility and subject-verb relations in complex sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10(2), 163–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(71)80008-7
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298(5598), 1569–1579. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.298.5598.1569
Hauser, M. D. (2010). On obfuscation, obscurantism, and opacity: Evolving conceptions of the faculty of language. In R. K. Larson, V. Déprez, & H. Yamakido (Eds.), The evolution of human languages: Biolinguistic perspectives (pp. 91–99). Cambridge University Press.
Hoover, M. L. (1992). Sentence processing strategies in Spanish and English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21(4), 275–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067514
Karlsson, F. (2007). Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses. Journal of Linguistics, 43(2), 365–392. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226707004616
Larkin, W., & Burns, D. (1977). Sentence comprehension and memory for embedded structure. Memory & Cognition, 5(1), 17–22. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209186
Miller, G. A. (1962). Some psychological studies of grammar. American Psychologist, 17(11), 748–762. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044708
Madhusudan, S., Chen, K., Emami, A. (2026). The dog the cat chased stumped the model: measuring when language models abandon structure for shortcuts. arXiv.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.20543
Miller, G. A., & Isard, S. (1964). Free recall of self-embedded English sentences. Information and Control, 7(3), 292–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(64)90310-9
Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: what’s special about it? Cognition, 95, 201–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.08.007
Sakel, J., & Stapert, E. (2010). Pirahã—in need of recursive syntax? In H. Van der Hulst (Ed.), Recursion and human language (pp. 3–16). De Gruyter/Mouton.
Tomalin, M. (2007). Reconsidering recursion in syntactic theory. Lingua, 117, 1784–1800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2006.11.001
van der Hulst, H. (2010). Re recursion. In H. Van der Hulst (Ed.), Recursion and human language (pp. xv–liii). De Gruyter/Mouton.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Jun Lai

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


