Tamar is a great mentor/scholar and she is one of the major reasons I am still in academia. Great opportunity

Well we will write one soon!

The relationship between tense and complementizer is really puzzling…

It’s okay to admit that you are jealous of case markers and scrambling.

You get thicker white matter track between left temporal lobe and frontal lobe if you speak Japanese though

The following article is now in press at Psychological Review. Interested to hear what people think! "The successes and failures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) highlight the importance of innate linguistic priors for human language acquisition".

osf.io/preprints/ps... via

"With admirable consistency he goes on to conclude... English is appropriate for the sciences, whereas Japanese "sont plus avantageuses pour les lettres"

"...French is unique... in the degree to which the order of words corresponds to the natural order of thoughts (Diderot, 1751)" (Chomsky 1965)

Matchin concludes that English is superior in the degree to which the order of words corresponds to how we scan a visual scene (Matchin, 2025, p.c.).

7 positions on language? Sounds like your school accounts for 90% of the jobs in language

If I were to design a language, I wouldn't use very subtle noise (-s) to have a large consequence for interpretation.

For parsing, yes. But language is not designed for communication.

I’d be surprised if head directionality has anything to do with it once cultural confounds are taken care of. Hiromu Sakai used to do a lot of eye-tracking while speaking studies in Japanese, so you might find something relevant (though their work is mostly conference presentations/thesis)

You mean left branching? (English is a right branching language?). If so, I speak Japanese and I am 95% certain I had the same left to right bias just like English speakers even before I had significant exposure to English.

✨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...

Well it’s a specific type of causative containing passive-like thing so I guess it’s fine to classify as a passive - I am just being a pedant. Constructions are epiphenomena anyway ;)

Not that it matters to your main point, but now I can’t stop thinking about what counts as passive (I thought “get X V-ed was a causative distinct from the get-passive but I guess the embedded clause is in a sense passive!)

lol People, get disillusioned by the illusion illusion

5 y.o: What does "memory" mean?

me, a cognitive scientist: (excellent question, let me try to come up with a necessary and sufficient condition for 'memory'....... oh no, my kid is about to lose interest...) ... well, it means "記憶" (memory in Japanese).

My partner and me: 🤦

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...

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 🙏

How do memory retrieval and prediction work together during sentence comprehension?
We use computational modelling and visual world eye-tracking to unpack their interaction in German pronouns. New article led by Elise Oltrogge, together by João Veríssimo, and Umesh Patil: doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

Aww shucks, thank you!