so cool!!

grushaprasad.bsky.social@grushaprasad.bsky.social · 16h ago

Does native speaker filtering impact effect sizes: Compared alternative definition of native speaker in terms of language usage and AOA to more commonly used self-report. No differences for SONA-lab, but there were differences in SONA-online. n/n

Deadline Dec 1: Asst prof (tenure track), open area, ‼️NU Linguistics‼️ "an integrated approach to the scientific study of language, utilizing experimental, computational, and/or data-intensive approaches to inform linguistic theory and its applications" linguistics.northwestern.edu/about/open-p...

Ever wondered why "Where did you say that I was" sounds better than "??Where did you reiterate that I was"? In this paper I co-authored with Julie Legate and Charles Yang, we present a learning-based account of this lexically-conditioned "island" effect (and the lack thereof in Mandarin)!

Lu, Jiayi & Kim, Nayoun. 2026. Adjunct Island Effect on Wh-Scrambling in Korean. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 11(1), 1–21. DOI: doi.org/10.16995/glo... #linguistics #DiamondOpenAccess

Adjunct Island Effect on Wh-Scrambling in Korean

In this squib, we present experimental evidence that Korean wh-scrambling, unlike non-wh-scrambling or wh-in-situ, is constrained by the -ttay temporal adjunct island effect. We further show that this...

doi.org

Standard RSA often assumes that speakers are certain about the meaning they intend to communicate, but this assumption need not always be true! In paper with @grushaprasad.bsky.social and @carolynanderson.bsky.social, we propose a method (um-RSA) to incorporate meaning uncertainty within RSA

Come join us! Northwestern Linguistics is hiring a lab manager -- perfect for a recent graduate who's interested in contributing to a vibrant interdisciplinary research community. Position is open immediately! careers.northwestern.edu/psp/hrnu_er/...

In 2016, I started working on my undergrad thesis where I was looking at ERP signatures for singular 'they'. In 2026, the work is finally published! www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy... Kudos to Joanna Morris for working on this the past few years and pushing it past the finish line!

Frontiers | Distinct ERP signatures for singular “they” and gender violations

IntroductionThe English pronoun system is undergoing rapid change, with singular “they” increasingly used to refer to specific individuals. A key question is...

frontiersin.org

today at 12:10!

grushaprasad.bsky.social@grushaprasad.bsky.social · 4mo ago

RSA modeling often assumes that meaning that speakers are certain about the meaning that they want to convey. Uncertainty comes from other sources. In #335 with @anziw.bsky.social we show modeling meaning uncertainty can account for differences between gumballs and elections that vanilla RSA can't!

Friday time! Poster 5 (# 365) @grushaprasad.bsky.social , @shotamomma.bsky.social and I leverage an ACT-R based parsing model (from Grusha’s previous work!) to evaluate potential explanations of gradient effects in cross-structural priming. Explicit parsers FTW!!

one year ago i thought p-side was about predicates and s-side was about subjects :3

Reposting because the link has expired: PDF: drive.google.com/file/d/1t2EF... (if this doesn't work, lmk) Publisher link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Speakers encode silent structures: Evidence from complementizer priming in English

Do speakers encode abstract structural representations devoid of perceptual-motor content, that is, phonology? In six recall-based production experime…

sciencedirect.com

Shota Momma@shotamomma.bsky.social · last yr.

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out (1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object. (2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

New Preprint: osf.io/eq2ra Reading feels effortless, but it's actually quite complex under the hood. Most words are easy to process, but some words make us reread or linger. It turns out that LLMs can tell us about why, but only in certain cases... (1/n)

New work to appear @ TACL! Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar. Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings. How can both things be true? 🧵👇

arxiv.org/abs/2510.05141

To model human linguistic prediction, make LLMs less superhuman

When people listen to or read a sentence, they actively make predictions about upcoming words: words that are less predictable are generally read more slowly than predictable ones. The success of larg...

arxiv.org

I've found it kind of a pain to work with resources like VerbNet, FrameNet, PropBank (frame files), and WordNet using existing tools. Maybe you have too. Here's a little package that handles data management, loading, and cross-referencing via either a CLI or a python API.

GitHub - aaronstevenwhite/glazing: Unified data models and interfaces for syntactic and semantic frame ontologies.

Unified data models and interfaces for syntactic and semantic frame ontologies. - aaronstevenwhite/glazing

github.com

Brand new version of this paper (now a short book!) available at lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008...!

Aaron Steven White@aaronstevenwhite.io · last yr.

Gist: programmatic translation of (sequences of) natural language expressions to STAN via the enriched compositional dynamic semantics we describe here: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008... We'll be talking about how it works in our {NA,E}SSLLI courses. nasslli25.shane.st 2025.esslli.eu

favorite garden path sentence of the year: "It's better to be hurt by someone you know accidentally, than by a stranger on purpose" by Dwight Schrute

arxiv.org/abs/2508.19546

Language Models Identify Ambiguities and Exploit Loopholes

Studying the responses of large language models (LLMs) to loopholes presents a two-fold opportunity. First, it affords us a lens through which to examine ambiguity and pragmatics in LLMs, since exploi...

arxiv.org

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out (1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object. (2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Work with kittens? Check out the National Kitten Coalition's new Kitten Resource Library! They're an org I like a lot!! library.kittencoalition.org

NKC Resource Library - The National Kitten Coalition’s Guide to Help You Save More Kittens™

National Kitten Coalition

library.kittencoalition.org

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory." arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog

As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pr...

arxiv.org

Someone asked me today how to get better at scientific writing. I'm not the best person to ask because I find my own writing very inadequate! But the tips I thought of were: 1. Practice, and practice with co-authors who are better writers than you. Observe how they make edits and copy them. (1/n)

is computational psycholinguistics a poly-sci? #puns #linguistics