MA student Linyang He leads a team that advances probing methods for large language models by combining a linear decoder with the BLiMP large-scale benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs. The result is a probing method that isolate patterns of layer-wise activation that are sensitive to distinct linguistic phenomena. There is a lot to unpack in…
Author: Jonathan R Brennan
Dr. Tzu-yun Tung defends dissertation, on to Chicago!
Many congratulations to Tzu-yun who has successfully defended her dissertation Prediction and Memory Retrieval during Dependency Resolution. The work combines electroencephalography, syntax, cognitive psychology and computational modeling to characterize how predictive mechanisms interact with memory retrieval – through the guise of interference effects – during language comprehension . The first paper from the dissertation is…
Reproducing the Alice analyses
One of our projects last summer was to go back into the archives and dig out the code used for data analyses in all our papers published that use the Alice in Wonderland EEG datasets. That code has been tidied up and is now shared publicly: https://github.com/cnllab/alice-eeg-shared With this you can reproduce all analyses, figures,…
Paper: Tung on prediction and memory retrieval
Tzu-Yun Tung publishes the first paper from her dissertation! Combining ERPs with an experimental design using NP-ellipsis in Mandarin, this work tests how interference effects in memory retrieval can be ameliorated by predictability. The particular pattern of amelioration – most evident in cases of ungrammatical “facilitatory interference” – are consistent with the hypothesis that predictions…
Lab presentations at SNL2023: See you in Marseille
Lab members will be presenting on decoding verb phrase construction, memory retreival during naturalistic comprehension, and morphological decomposition. We hope to see you there! Tung, Tzu-Yun Modeling memory retrieval during naturalistic comprehension. (Poster A46, Poster Session A Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm CEST) Zhao, Junyuan Tracking the representational dynamics of linguistic composition…
Jeonghwa Cho presents at AMLaP 2023
Do you need another excuse to visit San Sebastián, Spain for AMLaP 2023? Jeonghwa Cho will be presenting on two exciting projects: Poster: Sat Sep 2 14:00-15:10 Cross-language masked prefix priming for early and late bilinguals. (co-author Jonathan Brennan) Talk: Sat Sept 2 16:10-16:30 The time course of sentence planning in English (co-author Julie Boland)…
Paper: Comparing parsing strategies for a head-final language with RNNG
Yushi Sugimoto (UMich PhD 2022) and Yohei Oseki lead this paper demonstrating an advantage for left-corner parsing, as implemented with their updated RNNG, to capture neural signals while participants read Japanese newspaper text. This is the first paper, to my knowledge, testing parsing strategies in this way on a head-final language! Sugimoto, Y., Yoshida, R.,…
Paper: Parsing, CCG, and large language models
Miloš Stanojevič led this tremendous effort to test alternative approaches to structure-building that vary across grammar formalism and eagerness and, simultaneously, tease apart structure-building from next-word predictability. We are so happy to share it! Stanojević, M., Brennan, J. R., Dunagan, D., Steedman, M., & Hale, J. T. (2023). Modeling Structure-Building in the Brain With CCG…
Honors theses on role-reversals, real-time neural-synchrony, and COVID sentiment
Many congratulations to seniors in the lab who completed their honors theses! Shuchen Wen conducted an EEG experiment testing the timing of argument-structure by testing for N400 effects when argument roles were reversed in Ba- and Bei-constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Building on previous work, she manipulated the timing between arguments and target verb and found…
Award-winning undergraduate research at the Michigan research symposium
Congrats to the undergraduate researchers who presented their work at the spring research symposiums for the UROP program and MRADs program. Kennedy Lloyd won a coveted blue-ribbon award 🏆 for her poster titled Quantifying methodological racialized inequities in neurolinguistics. Analyzing evoked auditory responses from 66 participants, she found that signal quality was highest in white…