On the Emergence of Syntax by Means of Local Interaction

arXiv:2604.17857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can syntactic processing emerge spontaneously from purely local interaction? We present a concrete instance on a minimal system: an 18,658-parameter two-dimensional neural cellular automaton (NCA), supervised by nothing more than a 1-bit boundary signal, is trained on the membership problem of an arithmetic-expression grammar. After training, its internal L imes L grid spontaneously self-organizes into an ordered, spatially extended representation that we name Proto-CKY. This representation satisfies three operational criteria for syntactic processing: expressive power beyond the regular languages, structural generalization beyond the training distribution, and an internal organization quantitatively aligned with grammatical structure (Pearson r approx 0.71). It emerges independently on four context-free grammars and regenerates spontaneously after perturbation. Proto-CKY is functionally aligned with the CKY algorithm but formally distinct from it: it is a physical prototype, a concrete instantiation of a mathematical ideal on a physical substrate, and the systematic distance between the two carries information about the substrate itself.

Related

• Creating ConLangs to Probe the Metalinguistic Grammatical Knowledge of LLMs
• Internal Knowledge Without External Expression: Probing the Generalization Boundary of a Classical Chinese Language Model
• FregeLogic at SemEval 2026 Task 11: A Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Architecture for Content-Robust Syllogistic Validity Prediction

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-04-21