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 to demonstrate that the neural representation of the phrase head is reactivated at phrasal boundaries and also that such reactivation is does not appear to be modulated by conceptual similarity…
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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 and language processing in school-aged children during a naturalistic listening task. The results contribute to a growing body of research that is disentangling social theory-of-mind processing from other aspects of…
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, but these representations are modulated by language dominance. One key innovation of this study is a focus on prefixes, unlike the majority of previous studies that focus on shared (or…
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 naturalistic comprehension. See the HSP2025 program for more! Junyuan Zhao: Dissociating Predictive Sentence Processing from Acoustic Correlates in Naturalistic EEG Recordings from L1 and L2 Populations Poster 2.26 [abstract] Ren…
Lab presentations at SNL2024
Lab members will be presenting some of our latest work at SNL2024 in Brisbane Australia Oct 24-26 – be sure to stop by and say hi!! Maria Figueiredo (UMich undergraduate) will be presenting a poster titled Comparing LLM layerwise activation with EEG dynamics during language comprehension with RSA. Poster B7 (Friday, October 25, 10:00 –…
Jeonghwa Cho defends dissertation, publishes two new papers
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…
Paper: Neural decoding + Transformer + minimal pairs = new syntactic probing approach for LLMs
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…
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…