Brian Dillon
@linguistbrian.bsky.social
490 followers 450 following 15 posts
Psycholinguist at UMass Amherst Linguistics. people.umass.edu/bwdillon
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Reposted by Brian Dillon
wmatchin.bsky.social
University of South Carolina has *7* tenure-track faculty positions in Neurobiology of Language:

tinyurl.com/USC-Faculty-...

Positions in COMD, Psych, Linguistics, School of Medicine.

@snlmtg.bsky.social #SNL2025, we will have a booth.

w/@rutvikdesai.bsky.social @imb-uofsc.bsky.social
linguistbrian.bsky.social
So Özge isolated the role of c-command in 3 Turkish VW expts. Finding: c-commanding antecedents are retrieved faster and more often than non-c-commanding antecedents.

Big takeaway? Relational / Hierarchical structure really does guide attention from the earliest moments of language comprehension!
linguistbrian.bsky.social
... Özge found that despite tons of work on anaphors in last ~10 years, we *still* hadn't unambiguously demonstrated the role of relational constraints on anaphor processing. Too many 'simple' item-level cues like 'subject' that speakers could use in previous studies, complicating interpretation!
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Check out Özge's preprint!

Anaphors like reflexives have been studied a TON. Why? They're a useful model system for studying how linguistic information is organized in WM, because they appear to be subject to relational syntactic constraints on their interpretation.

In her research...
ozgebakay.bsky.social
✨New preprint out!
With Faruk Akkus and @linguistbrian.bsky.social
We show robust evidence for the rapid use of hierarchical relations in memory retrieval.
👉3 VW studies on the Turkish reciprocal
👉More looks to c-commanding subjects & indirect objects than to distractors
osf.io/preprints/ps...
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Hi! Me and my Ward 3 neighbors are strongly in support of this. How best should we communicate that support to you, and have it represented as part our wards views? We’d be very happy to see our Ward council member champion investment and growth in our ward and city!
Reposted by Brian Dillon
tmalsburg.bsky.social
3+1-year fully funded PhD position in Experimental and/or Computational Psycholinguistics. Official application deadline today, but applications submitted by August 25 will receive full consideration.

tmalsburg.github.io/job_ad_2025_...
Fully Funded PhD Position in Experimental and/or Computational Psycholinguistics
tmalsburg.github.io
Reposted by Brian Dillon
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Bumping this call for folks interested in work at the AI-psycholing interface!
tallinzen.bsky.social
I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
NYU LLM + cognitive science post-doc interest form
Tal Linzen's group at NYU is hiring a post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and int...
docs.google.com
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Congratulations are in order for @tallinzen.bsky.social as well! We’re excited and humbled, and grateful that we get to continue collaborating with a wonderful group of students and scholars. The support of the NSF goes a long way in supporting the next generation of scientists.
Reposted by Brian Dillon
tmalsburg.bsky.social
I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits (1-year extension possible). Research topic open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching until Summer 2027, light teaching after that (English). Official ad soon. Please share 🙏
linguistbrian.bsky.social
CRediT where CRediT is due
Reposted by Brian Dillon
mcxfrank.bsky.social
If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!
OECS thematic collections.
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Excited to share the new OECS article on 'Sentence Processing' written by Matt Wagers and myself! It's humbling to be included in the OECS, we hope you enjoy :)

oecs.mit.edu/pub/mn7mjhx9...
Sentence Processing
oecs.mit.edu
Reposted by Brian Dillon
liinapy.bsky.social
Congratulations to Dr. Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social for the successful defense of his dissertation “Combinatorics at-a-glance: On the spatiotemporal dynamics of temporally unstructured language”!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Reposted by Brian Dillon
anids.bsky.social
A bit late but since I really like this paper, a bit of self-advertising! I am presenting at CMCL today work showing that metrics measuring how a Minimalist Grammar parser modulates memory usage can help us model Self-paced reading data for SRC/ORC contrasts: aclanthology.org/2025.cmcl-1.5/
Capturing Online SRC/ORC Effort with Memory Measures from a Minimalist Parser
Aniello De Santo. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. 2025.
aclanthology.org
Reposted by Brian Dillon
anids.bsky.social
My turn for an #HSP2025 thread, since I will be traveling soon! I'll be there with two posters, and I so am excited to see all my favorite psycholinguists (aside from the great science XD)! 🐦🐦🐦
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Liz is really amazing and is an incredible fount of knowledge when it comes to eye-tracking-while-reading. It was a privilege to work with her on this, and we hope you and your students find it useful!
linguistbrian.bsky.social
Happy to share that Liz Schotter and I have just published a beginner-level tutorial introduction to eye-tracking-while-reading studies in Behavior Methods:

link.springer.com/article/10.3...
link.springer.com