I was just in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. Let’s talk next week!

📣 If you're at #AMLaP2025 in Prague, come see the poster #184 by CSL Lab's Cris Rivera and @mh-christiansen.bsky.social:

👉 "Comparing natural language statistical learning and human intuition for chunking language"

🗓️ Thursday afternoon (Sept 4), 17:20-18:50

📣Come see the two posters from the CSL Lab at #CogSci2025! 👀

👉 @elmlingersteven.bsky.social is presenting his on Friday 10:30AM-12PM

👉 Calen MacDonald is presenting his on Saturday 1-2:15PM

Want a short and accessible introduction to #LanguageEvolution? 🤔

👀 Take a look as CSL Lab's @mh-christiansen.bsky.social new contribution to the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Get up to speed in about 1K words—check out the references for more in-depth info

oecs.mit.edu/pub/18miikqb...

📣 New paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social by CSL-Lab's @mh-christiansen.bsky.social and @yngwienielsen.bsky.social reappraising what structural priming tells us about the representation of language: it's about context — not grammar.

Free download until Aug 8: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lIFK4sIRv...

The paper is a collaborative effort with Ram Frost, @bogaertslab.bsky.social, Art Samuel, @jimmagnuson.bsky.social, and Lori Holt

New paper from CSL Lab's @mh-christiansen.bsky.social and colleagues, rethinking the goal of #StatisticalLearning as providing the baseline against which novelty can be detected by a cognitive information foraging system
doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Results are presented from a lab-based cultural evolution, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experimentation. Together, these studies suggest that cultural evolution, constrained by chunk-based learning and processing mechanisms, has shaped the emergence of linguistic structure 4/4

He argues that, to deal with this Now-or-Never bottleneck, the brain must incrementally chunk and integrate the linguistic input as rapidly as possible before it is gone. This perspective has profound implications for the nature of language processing, acquisition, and evolution. 3/4

During normal linguistic interaction, we are faced with an immense challenge by the combined effects of rapid input, short retention of sensory information, and severely limited sequence memory. How, then, can the brain successfully handle the continual deluge of linguistic input? 2/4

In September 2024, CSL Lab's @mh-christiansen.bsky.social gave a talk in the Language Circle series on how chunking affects language across multiple timescales with implications for the nature of language processing, acquisition, and evolution:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOD1...

Abstract in 🧵 1/4

New CSL-Lab paper out by alumni Pablo Contreras Kallens and @mh-christiansen.bsky.social: Distributional Semantics: Meaning Through Culture and Interaction (including discussions of meaning in LLMs)
👉 Read it for free here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

If you're at #psynom24 go see the poster by CSL-Lab's Serene Wang about how to best measure real-time language skills: "Utterance Recall as a Measure of Second Language Proficiency: Cross-Linguistic Applicability and Fine-Grained Automatic Scoring" # 7028 in the poster session tonight, 7:45-9:15PM.

Very happy for the CSL Lab to have joined bluesky! Look here for posts about the various lab members' papers and presentations. 😀

More to come soon! 👀