Language must compress input now or lose it forever

Correct: B — Recode incoming linguistic input into more abstract chunks immediately, because raw acoustic and phonological detail decays within seconds

Christiansen and Chater (2016) marshalled evidence that auditory and phonological traces decay within seconds, forcing comprehenders to compress incoming input into higher-level representations (lexical, syntactic, conceptual) almost immediately, on a 'now-or-never' basis. The bottleneck reframes long-running debates: language acquisition becomes a chunking problem; sentence parsing must be incremental and predictive; and many cross-linguistic regularities follow from the pressure to package units before they decay. The view links the architecture of language directly to the timing constraints of working memory.