New preprint! w/@drhanjones.bsky.social Adding human-like memory limitations to transformers improves language learning, but impairs reading time prediction This supports ideas from cognitive science but complicates the link between architecture and behavioural prediction arxiv.org/abs/2508.05803

Can't wait for #CCN2025! Drop by to say hi to me / collaborators!

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

Next week I’ll be in Vienna for my first *ACL conference! 🇦🇹✨ I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️ 🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)

I'm sharing a Colab notebook on using large language models for cognitive science! GitHub repo: github.com/MarcoCiappar... It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵

📢 New paper out! We show that auditory iconicity is not marginal in English: word sounds often resemble real-world sounds. Using neural networks and sound similarity measures, we crack the myth of arbitrariness. Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.3... @andreadevarda.bsky.social

Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint. Generate a… - Python program that passes a test suite. - PDDL plan that satisfies a goal. - CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward. The list goes on… How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇

New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network** with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n 🧵

PINEAPPLE, LIGHT, HAPPY, AVALANCHE, BURDEN Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that? In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj

Excited to share new work on the language system! Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/ Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below!👇🧵

New brain/language study w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI scanning in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025... . 🧵

1/n Happy to share a new paper with Calogero Zarbo & Marco Marelli! How well do LLMs represent the implicit meaning of familiar and novel compounds? How do they compare with simpler distributional semantics models (DSMs; i.e., word embeddings)? doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

So excited to have our work on conlangs out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Congrats, Saima, Maya, and the rest of the crew -- well done! Here is the MIT news story: news.mit.edu/2025/esperan...

New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language? Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)

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/)