Welcome to the Computational Neurolinguistics Lab
How does the brain allow us to rapidly and effortlessly understand something as complex as human language?
Understanding language appears effortless, but this remarkable ability owes to the finely tuned interactions between a wide range of complex cognitive systems. The mind rapidly identifies what words are being said and the concepts those words refer to, fits those words together into a grammatical sentence, and computes the complex meanings and implications expressed by that sentence.`
We try to understand these mental systems and their interaction by combining computationally explicit models of each cognitive operation with data drawn from a wide range of neuroscience tools, including electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Advancing our understanding of these systems brings us closer to answering how and why neural disorders, such as those found in Autism and other developmental disorders, give rise to communication impairments. Such answers pave the way for better tools for diagnosis and intervention.
There are a few places to get a “birds-eyed view” of our work:
Listen to Jon and Paul Middlebrooks of the Brain Inspired Podcast discuss all things brains, language, and AI
Read our 2022 review article in Annual Reviews of Linguistics
Check out the many current projects listed on Jon’s website
Of course, there are many places to go for a deeper dive:
- Take a look at the list of our latest publications
- For the newest stuff, check out talks and posters from lab members
- Our data are openly available; use it for your own research!
Latest News
- Paper: Jeonghwa Cho on grammatical features within and between languages
Jeonghwa Cho (PhD 2024) tests the temporal dynamics and spatial stability of neural representations for lexical items and grammatical features by applying decoding methods to… Continue reading Paper: Jeonghwa Cho on grammatical features within and between languages - Paper: Junyuan Zhao on decoding phrasal categories
Out now in the Journal of Neuroscience, Junyuan Zhao develops an approach to decoding the category features of phrases from EEG data. He goes on… Continue reading Paper: Junyuan Zhao on decoding phrasal categories - Paper: Chi-Lin Yu on social and language processing during story-listening
Chi-Lin Yu leads a project, along with a team from the Kovelman developmental neuroscience lab, that uses fNIRS imaging to identify neural signatures of social… Continue reading Paper: Chi-Lin Yu on social and language processing during story-listening - Paper: Jeonghwa Cho on shared morphosyntactic representations in L1/L2
In a new paper appearing in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Jeonghwa Cho (Michigan PhD 2024) demonstrates evidence for shared morphosyntactic representations across languages in multilinguals,… Continue reading Paper: Jeonghwa Cho on shared morphosyntactic representations in L1/L2 - See you at HSP2025
Our lab will be presenting posters about disentangling syntactic from acoustic effects in electrophysiology and fNRIS imaging of language comprehension in dyslexia; both projects involve… Continue reading See you at HSP2025