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Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Despite their linguistic prowess, LLMs have been shown to be vulnerable to small input perturbations. While robustness to local adversarial changes has been studied, robustness to global modifications such as different linguistic styles…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
Multilingual wordlists play a crucial role in comparative linguistics. While many studies have been carried out to test the power of computational methods for language subgrouping or divergence time estimation, few studies have put the data…
Given the fast development of analysis techniques for NLP and speech processing systems, few systematic studies have been conducted to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each method. As a step in this direction we study the case of…
Self-supervised speech models can be trained to efficiently recognize spoken words in naturalistic, noisy environments. However, we do not understand the types of linguistic representations these models use to accomplish this task. To…
Cross-lingual alignment in pretrained language models enables knowledge transfer across languages. Similar alignment has been reported in Whisper-style speech encoders, based on spoken translation retrieval using representational…
Analyses of self-supervised speech models have begun to reveal where and how they represent different types of information. However, almost all analyses have focused on English. Here, we examine how wav2vec2 models trained on four different…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
Investigating linguistic relationships on a global scale requires analyzing diverse features such as syntax, phonology and prosody, which evolve at varying rates influenced by internal diversification, language contact, and sociolinguistic…
Multilingual language models have recently gained attention as a promising solution for representing multiple languages in a single model. In this paper, we propose new criteria to evaluate the quality of lexical representation and…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Languages have long been described according to their perceived rhythmic attributes. The associated typologies are of interest in psycholinguistics as they partly predict newborns' abilities to discriminate between languages and provide…
Evolutionary models of languages are usually considered to take the form of trees. With the development of so-called tree constraints the plausibility of the tree model assumptions can be addressed by checking whether the moments of…
As language models (LMs) become increasingly powerful and widely used, it is important to quantify them for sociodemographic bias with potential for harm. Prior measures of bias are sensitive to perturbations in the templates designed to…
Common designs of model evaluation typically focus on monolingual settings, where different models are compared according to their performance on a single data set that is assumed to be representative of all possible data for the task at…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated aptitude as potential substitutes for human participants in experiments testing psycholinguistic phenomena. However, an understudied question is to…