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Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. First, I review classic arguments for compositionality and conclude that they fail to establish compositionality as a property of human language. Next, I state a new competence argument, acknowledging the fact that any competent user of a language L can assign to most expressions in L at least one meaning which is a function<jats:italic>only<\/jats:italic>of the meanings of the expression's parts and of its syntactic structure. I then discuss selected results from cognitive neuroscience, indicating that the human brain possesses the processing capacities presupposed by the competence argument. Finally, I outline a language processing architecture consistent with the neuroscience results, where semantic representations may be generated by a syntax\u2010driven stream<jats:italic>and<\/jats:italic>by an \u201casyntactic\u201d processing stream, jointly or independently. Compositionality is viewed as a constraint on computation in the former stream only.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1111\/cogs.12949","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,5,21]],"date-time":"2021-05-21T08:04:18Z","timestamp":1621584258000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":37,"title":["Compositionality in a Parallel Architecture for Language Processing"],"prefix":"10.1111","volume":"45","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5086-0365","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Giosu\u00e8","family":"Baggio","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Language Acquisition and Language Processing Lab Department of Language and Literature Faculty of Humanities Norwegian University of Science and Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"311","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,5,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_8_2_1","volume-title":"The categories. 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