Excited to share our new publication, “Measuring Naturalistic Speech Comprehension in Real Time”!
➡️ rdcu.be/fa3hk #psynomBRM
w/ @kriesjill.bsky.social, Shiven Gupta, Maria Papworth Burrel, & @lauragwilliams.bsky.social
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New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro!
www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/
Very excited to have @juice500ml.bsky.social present his new work to our (D)NN-speech reading group this Thursday!
Contact me or Kwanghee for the zoom link if you'd like to join virtually.
New open-access paper out in Cognition with Megha Sundara (UCLA) - "The acquisition of native language phonotactics: Integrating insights from machine learning, and adult and infant experiments"
Link to paper: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
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Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling
(PLZ RT)
What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD!
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social
@mpi-nl.bsky.social
thank you @claudia-lopez.bsky.social for this clear and thoughtful coverage in @thetransmitter.bsky.social on some of our recent work on dynamic neural codes in speech processing! 🧠 🌀 ✨ www.thetransmitter.org/language/shi...
📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language
Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20
Please RT 🙏
👇
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language
I did a MSc project on seal pup vocalization timing in long rehab centre recordings years ago, may still have some relevant refs scripties.uba.uva.nl/search?id=re... and I believe Koen de Reus' PhD thesis (to be defended this week) has a bunch more up-to-date work on this! www.mpi.nl/events/imprs...
Our paper has been accepted to EACL 2026!🎉 We systematically evaluate several vision-language (VLMs) and language-only models, measuring their alignment with brain responses to concept words. Our results show that vision-language models offer a promising tool to model human concept processing
Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues!
A thread 🧵
If you're in the Netherlands or nearby, check out the Fourth Dutch Speech Tech Day. I'll be there.
www.eventbrite.com/e/4th-dutch-...
Commentary title: Linguists should learn to love speech-based deep learning models Authors: Marianne de Heer Kloots, Paul Boersma, Willem Zuidema Abstract: Futrell and Mahowald present a useful framework bridging technology-oriented deep learning systems and explanation-oriented linguistic theories. Unfortunately, the target article's focus on generative text-based LLMs fundamentally limits fruitful interactions with linguistics, as many interesting questions on human language fall outside what is captured by written text. We argue that audio-based deep learning models can and should play a crucial role.
'Tis the season to preprint BBS commentaries; I'm happy to share ours too! 🎄✨
The textual basis of current LLMs causes trouble, but linguistically relevant insights *can* be found in systems modelling the more natural form of human spoken language: the speech signal itself. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14506
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press.
This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website:
tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...
New post! Last week I shared why I thought cognitive (neuro)science hasn’t contributed as much as one might hope to the design of AI systems; this week I'm sharing my thoughts on how methods and principles from these fields *have* been useful in my work. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/how-cognit...
Poster title: Does multimodal pre-activation influence linguistic expectations in LLMs and humans? Authors: Sasha Kenjeeva, Giovanni Cassani, Noortje Venhuizen, Afra Alishahi
Poster title: Generalizing Without Evidence: How Transformer Models Infer Syntactic Rules From Sparse Input Authors: Mark van den Hoorn, Raquel G. Alhama
Poster title: Dependency Length, Syntactic Complexity & Memory: A Reading Time Benchmark for Sentence Processing Modeling Authors: Nina Nusbaumer, Corentin Bel, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Guillaume Wisniewski, Benoit Crabbé
Poster title: The success of Neural Language Models on syntactic island effects is not universal: strong wh-island sensitivity in English but not in Dutch Authors: Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro, Peter de Swart, Stefan L. Frank
Cool posters from day 2!
@sashakenjeeva.bsky.social openreview.net/forum?id=Vtd...
github.com/markvandenho... openreview.net/forum?id=rX3...
@nina-nusbaumer.bsky.social openreview.net/forum?id=GRz...
www.ru.nl/personen/sui... openreview.net/forum?id=NcJ...
Today we are time-travelling with @stefanfrank.bsky.social 😎
I’m really enjoying the Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting in Utrecht! cpl2025.sites.uu.nl 🧠
Yesterday MSc student Sven Terpstra (co-supervised w/ @wzuidema.bsky.social) presented his project on predicting the N400 with GPT-derived metrics beyond surprisal openreview.net/forum?id=MAl...
This is in response to the recent target article by @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social, a wonderful read! Thanks to the authors for writing such a clear and inspiring piece to start this discussion. doi.org/10.1017/S014...
Commentary title: Linguists should learn to love speech-based deep learning models Authors: Marianne de Heer Kloots, Paul Boersma, Willem Zuidema Abstract: Futrell and Mahowald present a useful framework bridging technology-oriented deep learning systems and explanation-oriented linguistic theories. Unfortunately, the target article's focus on generative text-based LLMs fundamentally limits fruitful interactions with linguistics, as many interesting questions on human language fall outside what is captured by written text. We argue that audio-based deep learning models can and should play a crucial role.
'Tis the season to preprint BBS commentaries; I'm happy to share ours too! 🎄✨
The textual basis of current LLMs causes trouble, but linguistically relevant insights *can* be found in systems modelling the more natural form of human spoken language: the speech signal itself. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14506
Why do humans have linguistic intuition? And why should you care?
A short thread about my new paper in @cadlin.bsky.social
This work has the most original insight I've ever had, a genuinely new idea about the nature of language
cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...
1/20
Many studies of naturalistic comprehension report that surprisal (often LLM derived) explains more of the variance in data than other predictors. Why is this? And why can it be problematic for our conclusions?
A 🧵 of takeaways from our paper doi.org/10.1007/s421... with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social
Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3
I had a wonderful time getting to know @gronlp.bsky.social last week while discussing linguistic structure and learning trajectories in speech models! ✨ Many thanks for the invite @frap98.bsky.social, already looking forward to catching up again soon :)
The title page
🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨
The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social)
Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics
Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanp
The Multilingual Minds & Machines Meetings call for abstracts is now open! Everything you need to know is here -> mmmm2026.github.io
