A whale conversation in whale vowels. Pinchy the whale and her conversant. The vowels are so clear that they can be transcribed with our human letters. aye, aye!

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

New work to appear @ TACL! Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar. Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings. How can both things be true? 🧵👇

New pre-print from our lab, by Lakshmi Govindarajan with help from Sagarika Alavilli, introducing a new type of model for studying sensory uncertainty. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here is a summary. (1/n)

I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA

The first publication of the #ERC project ‘LaDy’ is a fact and it’s an important one I think: We show that word processing and meaning prediction is fundamentally different during social interaction compared to using language individually! 👀 short 🧵/1 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... #OpenAccess

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets! We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it! 1/

New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity PSA! 🚨 🗓️ UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program applications are due Nov. 1 (ppfp.ucop.edu/info/) Open to anyone interested in a postdoc & academic career at a UC campus. I'm happy to sponsor an applicant if there’s a good fit— please reach out!

Officially out! "Predicting relative intelligibility from inter-talker distances in a perceptual similarity space for speech" S.E Kim, B. R. Chernyak, @keshet.bsky.social, me, & A. Bradlow link.springer.com/article/10.3.... BONUS: free online similarity calculator so you can join in the fun! 1/

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

New paper with @rjantonello.bsky.social @csinva.bsky.social, Suna Guo, Gavin Mischler, Jianfeng Gao, & Nima Mesgarani: We use LLMs to generate VERY interpretable embeddings where each dimension corresponds to a scientific theory, & then use these embeddings to predict fMRI and ECoG. It WORKS!

LLM finds it FAR easier to distinguish b/w DO & PO constructions when the lexical & info structure of instances conform more closely w/ the respective constructions (left 👇). Where's pure syntax? LLM seems to say "🤷‍♀️" (right) @SRakshit adele.scholar.princeton.edu/sites/g/file...

If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵 1/n

(1)💡NEW PUBLICATION💡 Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures Work with Curtis Chen and Ted Gibson Link to paper: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi... In memory of Curtis Chen.

1/7 If you're at CogSci 2025, I'd love to see you at my talk on Friday 1pm PDT in Nob Hill A! I'll be talking about our work towards an implemented computational model of noisy-channel comprehension (with @postylem.bsky.social, Ted Gibson, and @rplevy.bsky.social).

Looking forward to seeing everyone at #CogSci2025 this week! Come check out what we’ve been working on in the LInC Lab, along with our fantastic collaborators! Paper 🔗 in 🧵👇

Some happy science news (a small light in times of darkness). New paper out with @luciewolters.bsky.social and Mits Ota: : Skewed distributions facilitate infants’ word segmentation. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled to see this work published — and even more thrilled to have been part of such a great collaborative team! One key takeaway for me: Webcam eye-tracking w/ jsPsych is awesome for 4-quadrant visual world paradigm studies -- less so for displays w/ smaller ROIs.

New paper w/ @ryskin.bsky.social and Chen Yu: We analyzed parent-child toy play and found that cross-situational learning statistics were present in naturalistic settings! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖 Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths? Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

Unfortunately, the NSF grant that supports our work has been terminated. This is a setback, but our mission has not changed. We will continue to work hard on making cognitive science a more inclusive field. Stay tuned for upcoming events.

Does the mind degrade or become enriched as we grow old? To explain healthy aging effects, the evidence supports enrichment. Indeed, the evidence suggests changes in crystallized (enrichment) and fluid intelligence (slowing) share a common cause. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...

another day another minicons update (potentially a significant one for psycholinguists?) "Word" scoring is now a thing! You just have to supply your own splitting function! pip install -U minicons for merriment

AI models are fascinating, impressive, and sometimes problematic. But what can they tell us about the human mind? In a new review paper, @noahdgoodman.bsky.social and I discuss how modern AI can be used for cognitive modeling: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New Preprint!! LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

Out now! "Predicting relative intelligibility from inter-talker distances in a perceptual similarity space for speech" in Psychonomic Bulletin+Review. led by awesome postdoc Seung-Eun Kim, with B. R. Chernyak, @keshet.bsky.social and A. Bradlow. Supported by NSF. doi.org/10.3758/s134... 1/

✨Excited to share that our paper on how expectation violations shape novel human communication has just been published in Nature Communications! ✨ 📖 read the full paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... 🧵 Detailed breakdown bellow! 👇

What is human #StatisticalLearning for? The standard assumption is that the goal of SL is to learn the regularities in the environment to guide behavior. In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that SL instead is provides the basis for novelty detection within an information foraging system 1/2

Inaugural post on bsky: The ECOLANG Multimodal Corpus, providing audiovisual recordings and annotations of multimodal communicative behaviours by English-speaking adults in dyadic interaction with a child or another adult is now available rdcu.be/eblMF

My new book, MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/PenguinRandomHouse) arrives 6/3! It tells the story of how we produce language & how talking shapes our lives in surprising ways. It's psyling for gen'l audiences! Info & preorders www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046/more-than-words-by-maryellen-macdonald-phd/

📃Pragmatics as Social Inference About Intentional Action New paper with @mcxfrank.bsky.social in Open Mind We show that pragmatic inferences - work w/o language - take into account senders' epistemic states - are conditional on intentional production of signals direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

SO very excited about new paper with @simonkirby.bsky.social and @ellengarland.bsky.social: We used infant-inspired tools to analyze eight years of humpback whale song, finding recurring parts with a Zipfian frequency distribution. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨 New open-access paper out now in PB&R: link.springer.com/article/10.3... We (w/ Ted Gibson, @swathikiran.bsky.social) explore how individuals with aphasia interpret sentences & whether their comprehension difficulties stem from increased expectations of noise in language input. 🧵👇

"Methods based on infant speech segmentation, applied to 8 years of humpback recordings, uncovered in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language." Cool new paper by @inbalarnon.bsky.social, @simonkirby.bsky.social, @ellengarland.bsky.social out in @science.org. 🧪

Our language neuroscience lab (evlab.mit.edu) is looking for a new lab manager/FT RA to start in the summer. Apply here: tinyurl.com/3r346k66 We'll start reviewing apps in early Mar. (Unfortunately, MIT does not sponsor visas for these positions, but OPT works.)

New preprint! 🧠🤖 Brain encoding in 21 languages! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ Saima Malik-Moraleda, @gretatuckute.bsky.social , and @evfedorenko.bsky.social (1/)

So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...

Happy to share that Liz Schotter and I have just published a beginner-level tutorial introduction to eye-tracking-while-reading studies in Behavior Methods: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

My commentary on the do's and don'ts of cognitive evaluations in LLMs is now out in Nature Human Behavior: doi.org/10.1038/s415... posting here with a figure that didn't make it into the final draft and is now instead a boring table :P #CogSci #LLMs #AI

Happy New Year everyone! Jim and I just put up our January 2025 release of Speech and Language Processing! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

New preprint w/ Melissa Evans, Melissa Duff, & Sarah Brown-Schmidt. Using a temporal contiguity analysis, we showed that when adults w/ TBI retell stories, they make larger jumps between story details & demonstrate overall reduced temporal organization than non-injured peers. osf.io/preprints/ps...

The reply to our NRN piece (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) by Drijvers et al. presented a chance to clarify common confusions about our work on the language network (LN) and the functional localization approach more generally: rdcu.be/d5rkJ. 🧵1/n w/AnyaIvanova TamarRegev

Here's the kicker: "when ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly. Groups of people do not show such improvement and, when their communication is restricted, even display deteriorated performances." It's great that this paper includes movie clips of humans and ants in action!

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We've launched a jsPsych newsletter 📬

✨i'm hiring a lab manager, with a start date of ~September 2025! to express interest, please complete this google form: forms.gle/GLyAbuD779Rz... looking for someone to join our multi-disciplinary team, using OPM, EEG, iEEG and computational techniques to study speech and language processing! 🧠