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Morten H. Christiansen

@mh-christiansen.bsky.social

1.4K followers 230 following 45 posts

Cognitive scientist interested in the processing, acquisition and evolution of language; statistical learning; computational modeling. Lab website: https://csl-lab.psych.cornell.edu

csl-lab.psych.cornell.edu

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Nov 16

Just migrated here from academic twitter. Good to get back in touch with old connections and look forward to making new ones. I will post on all things #language, including #processing, #acquisition, and #evolution; #statistical-earning, #corpus-analyses, #LLMs, #L2-learning, #conversation and more

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Sep 3

Come see Cris Rivera's poster tomorrow at #AMLaP2025
👇

Cognitive Science of Language Lab @csl-lab.bsky.social · Sep 3

📣 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

Reposted by Morten H. Christiansen

BogaertsLab @bogaertslab.bsky.social · Aug 12

3️⃣ 2️⃣ 1️⃣ Just three days left to submit your nomination for the Early Career Talk at the #IASL26 conference.

🔗 ugent.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jul 30

Check out the two posters from @csl-lab.bsky.social at #CogSci2025 on Friday and Saturday in Salon 8.

Cognitive Science of Language Lab @csl-lab.bsky.social · Jul 30

📣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

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jul 28

Papers (cont):
Brown & Walasek
Trujillo, Zhang, Zhi-Xuan, Tenenbaum & Levine
Contreras Kallens & Christiansen
Chater

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jul 28

Learn more about Nick's groundbreaking work within cognitive science—including on simplicity, reasoning, similarity. decision-making, virtual bargaining, and language—along with personal musings by Mike and me.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Papers by
Oaksford
Hodgetts & Hahn

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jul 28

Just in time for the @cogscisociety.bsky.social conference and the Rumelhart 25th Anniversary Event, the 2023 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Nick Chater is out in TopiCS in Cognitive Science, edited by Mike Oaksford and me:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765...

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jul 22

Happy to contribute an article on #LanguageEvolution to the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science @oecs-bot.bsky.social

Everything you ever wanted to know about language evolution in ~1K words—well just scratching the surface 😉 dig into the references for more info

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

Language Evolution

oecs.mit.edu

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Reposted by Morten H. Christiansen

BogaertsLab @bogaertslab.bsky.social · Jul 21

🏅 💬 At the '22 edition of our conference, we launched the Early Career Talk, giving a platform to an outstanding early-career scientist. We are now seeking nominations for the Early Career Talk at the #IASL26 edition.

The deadline for nominations is August 15, 2025. Instructions in the thread.

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jul 18

📣 Save the date 🗓️ to present your exciting statistical learning research at the 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference June 10-12 2026 in San Sebastián 🇪🇸

Keynotes by
@jennysaffran.bsky.social
@noranewcombe.bsky.social
@pyoudeyer.bsky.social

More info to follow #IASL26

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jun 30

📌

Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jun 25

Read the full account here ⬇️

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lIFK4sIRv...

Read and download the article for free before August 08, 2025.

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
#Language #Grammar #Memory #Priming

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a downloading bar showing a percentage of 55 percent

Alt: a downloading bar showing a percentage of 55 percent

media.tenor.com

Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jun 25

We propose a top-down, memory-based perspective on structural priming in which multiple contextual (including non-syntactic) constraints shape the representation of a sentence. This proposal resolves the anomalous empirical findings and accounts for structural priming in LLMs.

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A picture of Box 1 from the article, describing aspects of the history of priming as it pertains to structural priming

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jun 25

We review recent empirical work from within the structural priming literature itself and from research on LLMs that questions the standard view of what structural priming says about the mental representation of language. Instead we offer an alternative account rooted in basic memory processes.

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A depiction of the traditional view of structural priming

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Jun 25

I'm excited about this TICS Opinion with @yngwienielsen.bsky.social, challenging the view that structural priming—the tendency to reuse a recent syntactic structure—provides evidence for the psychological reality of grammar-based constituent structure.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lIFK4sIRv...

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A picture of the title and abstract for the TiCS article: Context, not grammar, is key to structural priming.

The abstract reads: Structural priming—a change in processing after repeated exposure to a syntactic structure—has been put forward as evidence for the psychological reality of constituent structures derived from grammar. However, converging evidence from memory research, large language models, and structural priming itself challenges the validity of mapping structural representations onto grammatical constituents and demonstrates structural priming in the absence of such structure. Instead of autonomous representations specified by grammar, we propose that contextual representations emerging from multiple constraints (e.g., words, prosody, gesture) underlie structural priming. This perspective accounts for existing anomalous findings, is supported by the strong dependence on lexical cues observed in structural priming, and suggests that future research should prioritize studying linguistic representations in more naturalistic contexts.

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Reposted by Morten H. Christiansen

Warwick Psychology @warwickpsych.bsky.social · Jun 9

Nick Chater now introducing the idea of social tinkering and spontaneous order and their role in the origin of language @mh-christiansen.bsky.social #LLGAwayDay @warwickpsych.bsky.social

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Reposted by Morten H. Christiansen

Warwick Psychology @warwickpsych.bsky.social · Jun 9

Nick Chater joins us online to present his work on spontaneous communicative conventions with @mh-christiansen.bsky.social @warwickpsych.bsky.social #LLGAwayDay

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Reposted by Morten H. Christiansen

Ben Waber @bwaber.bsky.social · May 21

Last was "The Language Game" by @mh-christiansen.bsky.social & Nick Chater, who cover the neurological underpinnings of language, linguistic theory, and the philosophy of language with scientific rigor and an engaging narrative. Highly recommend

Full review: bookwyrm.social/user/bwaber/... (12/12)

The Language Game

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we go Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and...

www.hachettebookgroup.com

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Reposted by Morten H. Christiansen

Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.bsky.social · May 9

Our daily lives are packed w complex behaviours: reading a novel & piecing together the plot; negotiating decisions w family... How do we build mathematical models of the underlying cognitive mechanisms? Our new preprint osf.io/d2v54_v1 argues for a community approach A 🧵 1/

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 30

Laura Bridgman was a true pioneer in her time, and even mentioned by Charles Dickens in his travelogues from America:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_B...
We wrote about her in The Language Game, as an example of the amazing flexibility of human language:
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/morte...
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The Language Game

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we go Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and...

www.hachettebookgroup.com

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 30

I can imagine that Helen Keller may have other influences than Anne Sullivan but what I wanted to draw attention to is that despite being one of the most well-known women in the US in 1840s, she is now largely forgotten and Hellen Keller has gotten all the recognition
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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 29

And a final bonus meme: Laura Bridgman was the first person with no sight and hearing who learned how to communicate via finger spelling. She later taught Anne Sullivan who introduced Helen Keller to finger spelling. Yet, sadly, most are unaware of Laura Bridgman's pioneering role today.
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A meme showing the American public favoring Helen Keller over Laura Bridgman

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 29

The second third-place meme was about Harry Harlow's Pitt of Despair, which was used to illustrate one of the many reasons for why "the forbidden experiment" (involving bringing up children in isolation to see if they develop language) can never be done.
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Monkey with arms on it's head, indicating despair

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 29

Two memes ended up in third place. The first one is about the McGurk effect in which an auditory /ba/ combined with the lip movements for "Ga" leads to the perception of a "Da".
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A meme illustrating the McGurk effect, where auditory "Ba" plus visual "Ga" yields the perception of "Da"

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 29

The runner up was about a second topic that elicited several memes: The rapid turn-taking in everyday conversations
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A meme about turn-taking, suggesting that someone is a fast turn-taker because they keep on interrupting people

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · Apr 29

Every year at the end of the semester, I ask the students in my Psych of Language class to create memes about what they've learned. They then vote for their favorites.
Here's the winner about how the idea of a universal grammar is no longer as compelling as it once seemed.
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A meme about Chomsky's notion of universal grammar and how it is no longer as dominant in theories of language acquisition

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