Related papers: Multipath parsing in the brain
Syntactic parsing is the task of assigning a syntactic structure to a sentence. There are two popular syntactic parsing methods: constituency and dependency parsing. Recent works have used syntactic embeddings based on constituency trees,…
A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language…
Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…
Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent…
To maintain coherence in language, the brain must satisfy key competing temporal demands: the gradual accumulation of meaning across extended context (drift) and the rapid reconfiguration of representations at event boundaries (shift). How…
Surprisal theory posits that the processing difficulty of a word is determined by its predictability in context, offering a potential link between human sentence processing and next-word predictions from language models. While language…
Analyzing how human beings resolve syntactic ambiguity has long been an issue of interest in the field of linguistics. It is, at the same time, one of the most challenging issues for spoken language understanding (SLU) systems as well. As…
Human languages differ widely in their forms, each having distinct sounds, scripts, and syntax. Yet, they can all convey similar meaning. Do different languages converge on a shared neural substrate for conceptual meaning? We used language…
In this article we present a multivariate model for determining the different syntactic, semantic, and form (surface-structure) processes underlying the comprehension of simple phrases. This model is applied to EEG signals recorded during a…
Many studies have revealed that sentence comprehension relies more on semantic processing than on syntactic processing. However, previous studies have predominantly emphasized the preference for semantic processing, focusing on the semantic…
When humans read a text, their eye movements are influenced by the structural complexity of the input sentences. This cognitive phenomenon holds across languages and recent studies indicate that multilingual language models utilize…
We investigate a new setting for foreign language learning, where learners infer the meaning of unfamiliar words in a multimodal context of a sentence describing a paired image. We conduct studies with human participants using different…
Understanding how humans process natural language has long been a vital research direction. The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently experienced a surge in the development of powerful language models. These models have…
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit increasingly sophisticated linguistic capabilities, yet the extent to which these behaviors reflect human-like cognition versus advanced pattern recognition remains an open question. In this study, we…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
Prior work on generating explanations in a planning and decision-making context has focused on providing the rationale behind an AI agent's decision making. While these methods provide the right explanations from the explainer's…
A fundamental question in neurolinguistics concerns the brain regions involved in syntactic and semantic processing during speech comprehension, both at the lexical (word processing) and supra-lexical levels (sentence and discourse…
Recent studies in speech perception have been closely linked to fields of cognitive psychology, phonology, and phonetics in linguistics. During perceptual attunement, a critical and sensitive developmental trajectory has been examined in…
Structural probing work has found evidence for latent syntactic information in pre-trained language models. However, much of this analysis has focused on monolingual models, and analyses of multilingual models have employed correlational…