Dr. Jeonghwa Cho successfully defended her dissertation on April 16th, titled Cross-linguistic Representation and Processing of Words,Grammatical features, and Sentences. The committee was Julie Boland, Jonathan Brennan (chair), Shota Momma from UMass, and Savi Namboodiripad. Shortly after the defense, Jeonghwa was on the road giving talks at the Central European University in Vienna, then on…
Category: publications
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…
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…
Two preprints: separating incremental composition from predictability and localizing dependency-processing across languages
Update: Both of these papers are now in print! Stanojevic et al, in Cognitive Science and Dunagan et al. in Neurobiology of Language I’m still catching up on some of our efforts from before the new year. These include two (2) pre-prints of papers that make use of the Little Prince datasets. First up: Miloš…
Paper and data: fMRI datasets and linguistic annotations from naturalistic listening in English, Mandarin, and French
Jixing Li let a large team to prepare these unique neurolinguistic datasets. Speakers of English (49), Mandarin (35) or French (28) listened to a 1.5 h audiobook of The Little Prince during fMRI scanning. The full MRI datasets are released along-side numerous linguistic annotations including prosodic contours, GloVe embeddings, POS tags, constituency parses, dependency parses,…
Paper: neural synchrony for structure, not lexical patterns
A team led by Chia-wen Lo (PhD 2021, now at MPI Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences) has a new paper in Neurobiology of Language. Together with Tzu-yun Tung (4th year PhD student) and Alan Hezao Ke (PhD 2019), this paper tests whether previously observed patterns of low-frequency neural synchrony to timed speech reflects lexical repetition…
Book! A slim guide to neurolinguistics
Jon’s new book, Language and the brain: A slim guide to neurolinguistics is now available for pre-order! This book, published by Oxford University Press, does just what it says in the title. From the jacket blurb: This book introduces readers to the state-of-the-art neuroscientific research that is revolutionizing our understanding of language […] Written in…
New review paper on neurocomputational models
We have a new paper reviewing the state-of-the-art in neurocomputational models for sentence understanding. The basic take-aways are: (1) we have made tangible progress on the Mapping Problem linking linguistic constructs to neural signals, (2) This progress is underwritten by interpretable computational models, and (3) progess will only be sustained if we broaden the domain…
Paper: Brains, structure, and CCG
Miloš Stanojević (formerly Edinburgh, now DeepMind) led a really fantastic team to put his CCG parser, developed with Mark Steedman (here) in contact with fMRI data collected while participants listen to The Little Prince (see here). Model comparison affirms the value of the CCG structure, and in particular Miloš’ innovative approach to right-adjunction, in characterizing…