News – Computational Neurolinguistics Lab

Grammatical feature decoding within and between languages

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Jeonghwa Cho (PhD 2024) tests the temporal dynamics and spatial stability of neural representations for lexical items and grammatical features by applying decoding methods…

Decoding phrasal categories

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Out now in the Journal of Neuroscience, Junyuan Zhao develops an approach to decoding the category features of phrases from EEG data. He goes on to demonstrate that the…

See you at HSP2025

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Our lab will be presenting posters about disentangling syntactic from acoustic effects in electrophysiology and fNRIS imaging of language comprehension in dyslexia; both…

Social and language processing during story-listening

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Chi-Lin Yu leads a project, along with a team from the Kovelman developmental neuroscience lab, that uses fNIRS imaging to identify neural signatures of social and language…

Shared affixes in L1 and L2

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In a new paper appearing in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Jeonghwa Cho (Michigan PhD 2024) demonstrates evidence for shared morphosyntactic representations across…

Lab presentations at SNL2024

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Lab members will be presenting some of our latest work at SNL2024 in Brisbane Australia Oct 24-26 – be sure to stop by and say hi!!

Jeonghwa Cho defends dissertation, publishes two new papers

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Dr. Jeonghwa Cho successfully defended her dissertation on April 16th, titled Cross-linguistic Representation and Processing of Words, Grammatical features, and Sentences.…

Neural decoding + Transformer + minimal pairs = new syntactic probing approach for LLMs

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MA student Linyang He leads a team that advances probing methods for large language models by combining a linear decoder with the BLiMP large-scale benchmark of linguistic…

Dr. Tzu-yun Tung defends dissertation, on to Chicago!

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Many congratulations to Tzu-yun who has successfully defended her dissertation Prediction and Memory Retrieval during Dependency Resolution.

Reproducing the Alice analyses

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One of our projects last summer was to go back into the archives and dig out the code used for data analyses in all our papers published that use the Alice in Wonderland EEG…

Lab presentations at SNL2023: See you in Marseille

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Lab members will be presenting on decoding verb phrase construction, memory retreival during naturalistic comprehension, and morphological decomposition. We hope to see you…

Tung on prediction and memory retrieval

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Tzu-Yun Tung publishes the first paper from her dissertation! Combining ERPs with an experimental design using NP-ellipsis in Mandarin, this work tests how interference…

Jeonghwa Cho presents at AMLaP 2023

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Do you need another excuse to visit San Sebastián, Spain for AMLaP 2023? Jeonghwa Cho will be presenting on two exciting projects:

Comparing parsing strategies for a head-final language with RNNG

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Yushi Sugimoto (UMich PhD 2022) and Yohei Oseki (U Tokyo) lead this paper demonstrating an advantage for left-corner parsing, as implemented with their updated RNNG, to…

Parsing, CCG, and large language models

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Out now in Cognitive Science: Miloš Stanojevič leads this tremendous effort to test alternative approaches to structure-building that vary across grammar formalism and…

Award-winning undergraduate research at the Michigan research symposium

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Congrats to the undergraduate researchers who presented their work at the spring research symposiums for the UROP program and MRADs program.

Honors theses on role-reversals, real-time neural-synchrony, and COVID sentiment

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Many congratulations to seniors in the lab who completed their honors theses!

See you in Pittsburgh for HSP 2023

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We are looking forward to HSP2023 in Pittsburgh! Be sure to see the latest from lab members on cross-language grammatical representations, modeling retrieval interference…

Two preprints: separating incremental composition from predictability and localizing dependency-processing across languages

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Update: Both of these papers are now in print! Stanojevic et al, in Cognitive Science and Dunagan et al. in Neurobiology of Language

Dr. Tamarae Hildebrandt defends dissertation

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Congratulations are in order for newly minted Ph.D. Tamarae Hidlebrandt who successfully defended her dissertation on December 19th! The dissertation describes a host of…

fMRI datasets and linguistic annotations from naturalistic listening in English, Mandarin, and French

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Jixing Li led a large team to prepare these unique neurolinguistic datasets. Speakers of English (49), Mandarin (35) or French (28) listened to a 1.5 h audiobook of The…

Presenting at AMLAP2022

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Tzu-Yun Tung will be at the 2022 meeting of Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing to present some of her dissertation research on memory retrieval during…

See you in Philadelphia for SNL2022!

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Neural synchrony for structure, not lexical patterns

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A team led by Chia-wen Lo (PhD 2021, now at MPI Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences) has a new paper in Neurobiology of Language. Together with Tzu-yun Tung (4th year PhD…

Rachel Weissler to join U Oregon faculty!

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We’re thrilled with the news that Dr. Rachel Weissler (PhD 2021) has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Oregon, beginning Fall 2023.

Jeonghwa Cho presents at COGSCI2022 in Toronto

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We are looking forward to CogSci 2022 in Toronto!

Fellowship award for Tzu-Yun Tung

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Congratulations are in order for Tzu-Yun Tung! She has been awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship by University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School to pursue her dissertation…

Video: Lessons learned while searching for syntax in the brain

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This is a talk given at the University of Michigan offering some small measured optimism on mapping between language and neurobiology. It includes some of the newest work…

Book! A slim guide to neurolinguistics

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Jon’s new book, Language and the brain: A slim guide to neurolinguistics is now available for pre-order! This book, published by Oxford University Press, does just what it…

2022 Conference on Human Sentence Processing

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We’re looking forward to seeing you virtually at the 2022 Conference on Human Sentence Processing hosted March 24-26 by UC Santa Cruz! The latest from our lab includes:

New review paper on neurocomputational models

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We have a new paper reviewing the state-of-the-art in neurocomputational models for sentence understanding. The basic take-aways are: (1) we have made tangible progress on…

Conference paper on brains, structure, and CCG

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Miloš Stanojević (formerly Edinburgh, now DeepMind) led a really fantastic team to put his CCG parser, developed with Mark Steedman (here) in contact with fMRI data…

Dr. Rachel Weissler defends dissertation, joins U Oregon

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Rachel Weissler successfully defended her dissertation back on June 16th and I was prompted to update this news post because the paperwork is now signed and sealed. Details…

Video: Rachel Weissler gives BU Colloquium

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Rachel Weissler’s April 30th colloquium for the Linguistics Department at Boston University was titled “How do our experiences influence perception? Exploring the…

Video: Jon on bridging computation and implementation

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Here’s a video of Jon’s talk from the MPI Psycholinguistics 40th anniversary workshop “Neurobiology of Language: Key Issues and Ways Forward“.

Congratulations Dr. Chia-wen Lo!!

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Chia-wen Lo successfully defended her dissertation on April 13th – Many many Congratulations Dr. Lo!!!

Check out the latest (virtually) at CUNY2021

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Some exciting work from our lab will be presented at the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (hosted, virtually, at the University of Pennsylvania). The…

Comings and Goings, Fall 2020 Edition

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It’s time to catch up on the arrivals and departures the lab has seen over the last 6 months or so!

Dr. Emily Sabo defends dissertation and joins Mango Languages

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We’re so proud of Emily Sabo who has accepted a position at Mango Languages as a research scientist. Go Emily!!

New paper by Chia-wen Lo in Frontiers in Human Neurosciences

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Take a look at the fantastic new paper by Chia-wen Lo now out in Frontiers in Human Neurosciences. In this paper, Chia-wen uses EEG to probe the memory mechanisms at play…

New paper on learning phonological regularities in ASD

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Neelima Wagley (Umich Ph.D. 2019, now post-doc at Vanderbilt) has published a wonderful MEG study testing the brain bases of how school-aged children learn the statistical…

Localizing compositional processing in the brain with RNNGs

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As part of our NSF-funded work, we have a new paper out drawing on efforts from John Hale (DeepMind, UGA), Chris Dyer (DeepMind), and Adhi Kuncoro (DeepMind). Here we…

Posters on dialect comprehension, relative clauses, oscillations, and more at SNL2020!

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One boon of virtual conferences is that the presentations can be made available to a much wider audience. Be sure to check out posters from our lab that were presented at…

Talks and Posters at CUNY2020 in Amherst

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In case you missed it, you can now watch Rachel Weissler’s stellar CUNY2020 talk, titled Racial identity matters: EEG correlates reflect syntactic expectation based on both…

fMRI Whole-brain datasets from Alice in Wonderland

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Shohini Bhattasali has led the tremendous effort to make available the full whole-brain fMRI datasets recorded as part of the Alice in Wonderland project conducted in…

Talks and Posters at CUNY2020 in Amherst

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The lab is looking forward to the 2020 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at UMass Amherst from March 19th to 21st! Be sure to check out our latest work:

Paper on grammatical expectations to African American Language

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Rachel Weissler’s work on grammatical expectations to African American Language is now out in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics!

Emily Sabo TEDx talk on language and humor

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Emily Sabo takes us through three guiding principles on what the scientific study of language can tell us about what makes us laugh.

Podcast: Language in Minds and Machines

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Jon talks with Paul at the excellent podcast Brain Inspired.

Training, text genre and human-like parsing

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We have a new paper about RNNGs and EEG data from the DeepMind team (John Hale, Chris Dyer, Adhi Kuncoro), now also with Keith Hall at Google Research. Training the RNNG…

Phrases and phases

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With the amazing Andrea Martin, we’re taking the first peak at whether the phase of delta, theta, and gamma oscillations align with constituency in naturalistic stimuli.…

Reviewing the neural bases of composition

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Liina Pylkkänen and I have a forthcoming review on the neural bases of syntactic and semantic composition. It will appear in the 6th edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences…

Comings and Goings, Fall 2019 Edition

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With a new school-year starting, we welcome new researchers to the lab, and also say good-bye as others move on to (better??) things.

Report from Berlin: ‘Data, meet Theory’ Computation as an interdisciplinary bridge

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This is a place-holder for a post following up on the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting held in Berlin Sept 13-17th. And, especially, discussiong the…

Slides from Jon’s Early Career talk at SNL2019

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The neural dynamics of naturalistic language comprehension

See you in Helsinki for SNL2019

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The lab is coming out in force for SNL2019 in Helsinki! Please be sure to check out what we’ve been up to:

Video: Modeling EEG with deep neural networks

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John Hale’s talk at ACL 2018 last summer was recorded! Finding syntax in human encephalography with beam search

Dylan and Ibrahim on filtering ERPs at the UROP Symposium

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Congrats to Dylan Rodriguez and Ibrahim Lubis for an excellent poster presentation at the 2019 UROP Spring Research Symposium!

Congrats Dr. Wagley!

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Congratulations to Dr. Neelima Wagley, who successfully defended her dissertation Language and Literacy Development as Revealed Through the Bilingual Brain (Ioulia Kovalman…

Syntactic surprisal and EEG

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Out today in PLoS ONE: John Hale and I test whether EEG correlates of syntactic expectation reflect syntactic structure or linear sequences while adults simply listen to a…

New year new paper! Story-listening and predictions in Autism Spectrum Disorder

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I’m super happy to see this paper out in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. This is the third paper out of a collaboration with Renee Lajiness-O’Neill, Susan Bowyer and…

EEG Datasets for Naturalistic Listening to Alice in Wonderland

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We’re pleased to release the raw EEG data, pre-processing parameters and stimulus details for our EEG story-listening experiment. The data comprise 49 human…

Best Paper award for 2018 ACL paper on syntax+eeg+deep learning

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Finding syntax in human encephalography with beam search has been selected as one of three “Best Papers (long format)” for the 2018 meeting of the Association for…

Jon talks about modeling EEG data with deep neural network grammars

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Jon will be presenting some of the latest and greatest on using linguistically reasonable models of incremental parsing to probe EEG signals. This project , a collaboration…

Parsey McParseface as a cognitive model? Two chances to hear about Tyree’s Honors Thesis

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Update: Further congratulations are in order for Tyree’s Honorable Mention for an Outstanding Oral Presentation at MUCSC!

See us at CUNY2018 in Davis

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If you are going to be at the CUNY conference in Davis this weekend, make sure to stop by to see some of our latest work!

ROIs in our 2016 Brain and Language paper: A supplement to the supplement

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Our Abstract linguistic structure paper, published in Brain & Language in 2016, featured an ROI analysis based on individual-subject peaks. We give the peak coordinates in…

Relating neural synchrony to clinical symptomatology in Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Appearing in Autism Research, this study compares whole-brain source-localized region-to-region coherence estimates with a range of clinical measures to better understand…

Lexicalized syntactic priming in L2

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This paper extends an existing body of research about structural priming to second-language learners and suggests that similar mechanisms are at play in both populations. I…

Fall 2017 talks and posters

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There are many upcoming opportunities to here about the new stuff we are doing!

Recent talks on neural mechanisms for sentence comprehension and word recognition

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Here are slides from two recent talks:

The parsing strategy implemented by the left anterior temporal lobe

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Previous research links parts of the left temporal and left frontal lobes with aspects of sentence comprehension. But, the procedure carried out in these regions has not…

NSF grant to develop computational tools for modeling neural data during natural listening

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We’re very pleased to have received an NSF CRCNS grant to develop computational models of brain systems involved in sentence comprehension. This is part of a collaboration…

Neural responses to (ir)regular phonotactics in ASD measured with MEG

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In a new paper, we report that school-aged children with ASD show different evoked brain response patterns to made-up words with irregular phonotactics (sound sequences not…

DIY guide to the neurolinguistics of naturalistic sentence processing

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We have a new paper appearing in Language and Linguistics Compass that is part review and part DIY guide for studying naturalistic sentence processing in the brain. The…

fMRI timecourses / story-listening

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We have publicly released the ROI data and stimulus files connected to our paper Abstract Linguistic Structure Correlates with Temporal Activity during Naturalistic…

Comparing grammar and parsing models against fMRI data

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We have a new paper in Brain and Language in which we compare various grammatical models (Markov, context-free, minimalist) in terms of their fit against fMRi signals…

Year-end student presentations! Onset effects on N400 latency and speaker-switch effects on repetition priming

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Congratulations to two lab members who presented their research this week.

CUNY2016 and Hierarchical Structure during Naturalistic Comprehension

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It was great to catch up with the sentence processing community in Gainesville over the weekend! It was especially stimulating to participate in a wonderful session of talks…

See you in Chicago for SNL 2015

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The lab will be presenting four posters at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language:

Workshop Paper: Parsing models and fMRI

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Presented at the the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics: Modeling fMRI time courses with linguistic structure at various grain sizes. (with…

New paper reporting preliminary analysis of ASD data

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A new paper appears in this month’s Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences by lead author Ioulia Kovelman. This paper reports results from three studies, two from…

CUNY poster on syntactic processing and social identity

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If you are in California this weekend for the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, be sure to stop by Poster 1073 on Thursday evening. Lab alum (now Rochester grad…

Video: Language comprehension in school-aged children with and without ASD

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At the 2014 MCubed Symposium at the Univeristy of Michigan, Ioula Kovelman, Renee Lajiness O’Neill and I presented a brief report of our ongoing research on language…

Upcoming conference presentations

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It will be a busy August for the lab! We will be presenting two posters at SNL Aug 27-29:

New paper on oscillatory correlates of lexical processing

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Out now in Brain and Language, with colleagues from the CHOP MEG center, we use a semantic priming paradigm to test for changes in event-related synchronization and…

New lab members

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Welcome to Patricia Masello and Rachael Eby! They are joining us through the UROP/MRC undergraduate research programs.

Language and ASD data collection begins

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We’re pleased to report that the first pilot data from our collaboration with Henry Ford Hospital on language processing in Autism has been collected with the help of…

Welcome to summer researchers

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Data collection in the EEG lab is starting to flow, thanks largely to the efforts of undergraduate researchers Max Cantor, Jacob Freund, Maggie Ugolini, Evan Buysse and Omar…

Seed funding from M-Cubed for Autism research

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With Renee Lajiness-O’Neill and Ioulia Kovelman, our project Neural Coherence at Rest and During Language Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder” has received seed funding…

EEG Lab Updates

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Our new Brain Products 64-channel ActiCHamp EEG system has been successfully tested! The image shows a single subject’s AEP evoked by 100 1KHz tones at Cz. The timing is off…

EEG equipment arrived and being set up

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Lab renovations under way

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