Brian Dillon

The insights in this preprint are the result of some monumental efforts on the part of these researchers. I really can't put it better than Will did in his thread, so go read it, and see why we're convinced that the eyes index syntactic processing difficulty beyond predictability.

I can't recommend working with @tallinzen.bsky.social @wtimkey.bsky.social @sarehalli.bsky.social @byungdoh.bsky.social Kuan-Jung Huang and Grusha Prasad enough :)

I'm really proud and grateful to be part of this research team. It has been fun and intellectually invigorating, and I have very many fond memories of working through this together with everyone.

Really big announcement! See @wtimkey.bsky.social's thread for the details on an exciting new preprint from the NYU-UMass Syntactic Ambiguity Processing group. It is the culmination of the team's research efforts over these last couple of years, and we're really happy with it.

University of South Carolina has *7* tenure-track faculty positions in Neurobiology of Language:

tinyurl.com/USC-Faculty-...

Positions in COMD, Psych, Linguistics, School of Medicine.

@snlmtg.bsky.social #SNL2025, we will have a booth.

w/@rutvikdesai.bsky.social @imb-uofsc.bsky.social

Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media Unlike most nonimmigrant classifications, which are admitted for a fixed time period, aliens in the F (academic student), J (exchange visitor), and most I (representatives of foreign information media...

A proposed new rule would limit international students on F1 or J1 visas to stays in the US of no longer than 4 years. This effectively means that intl. students will no longer come to graduate school here (time to PhD is 5-6 years). You can comment here:

www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

So Özge isolated the role of c-command in 3 Turkish VW expts. Finding: c-commanding antecedents are retrieved faster and more often than non-c-commanding antecedents.

Big takeaway? Relational / Hierarchical structure really does guide attention from the earliest moments of language comprehension!

... Özge found that despite tons of work on anaphors in last ~10 years, we *still* hadn't unambiguously demonstrated the role of relational constraints on anaphor processing. Too many 'simple' item-level cues like 'subject' that speakers could use in previous studies, complicating interpretation!

Check out Özge's preprint!

Anaphors like reflexives have been studied a TON. Why? They're a useful model system for studying how linguistic information is organized in WM, because they appear to be subject to relational syntactic constraints on their interpretation.

In her research...

Hi! Me and my Ward 3 neighbors are strongly in support of this. How best should we communicate that support to you, and have it represented as part our wards views? We’d be very happy to see our Ward council member champion investment and growth in our ward and city!

3+1-year fully funded PhD position in Experimental and/or Computational Psycholinguistics. Official application deadline today, but applications submitted by August 25 will receive full consideration.

tmalsburg.github.io/job_ad_2025_...

Check this out! Happy to talk to folks about Valley living, feel free to DM.

Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share!
mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Fully-funded PhD position in experimental and/or computational psycholinguistics:

tmalsburg.github.io/job_ad_2025_...

Application deadline is August 15.

Bumping this call for folks interested in work at the AI-psycholing interface!

Congratulations are in order for @tallinzen.bsky.social as well! We’re excited and humbled, and grateful that we get to continue collaborating with a wonderful group of students and scholars. The support of the NSF goes a long way in supporting the next generation of scientists.

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits (1-year extension possible). Research topic open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching until Summer 2027, light teaching after that (English). Official ad soon. Please share 🙏

CRediT where CRediT is due

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Sentence Processing

Excited to share the new OECS article on 'Sentence Processing' written by Matt Wagers and myself! It's humbling to be included in the OECS, we hope you enjoy :)

oecs.mit.edu/pub/mn7mjhx9...

Reasonable!

Congratulations to Dr. Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social for the successful defense of his dissertation “Combinatorics at-a-glance: On the spatiotemporal dynamics of temporally unstructured language”!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Capturing Online SRC/ORC Effort with Memory Measures from a Minimalist Parser Aniello De Santo. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. 2025.

A bit late but since I really like this paper, a bit of self-advertising! I am presenting at CMCL today work showing that metrics measuring how a Minimalist Grammar parser modulates memory usage can help us model Self-paced reading data for SRC/ORC contrasts: aclanthology.org/2025.cmcl-1.5/

My turn for an #HSP2025 thread, since I will be traveling soon! I'll be there with two posters, and I so am excited to see all my favorite psycholinguists (aside from the great science XD)! 🐦🐦🐦

Congratulations!

What’s Surprising About Surprisal - Computational Brain & Behavior In the computational and experimental psycholinguistic literature, the mechanisms behind syntactic structure building (e.g., combining words into phrases and sentences) are the subject of considerable...

a plea to think carefully about surprisal + what it means to understand how we understand >> link.springer.com/article/10.1...

brand new paper in Computational Brain and Behaviour with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social at @mpi-nl.bsky.social

Liz is really amazing and is an incredible fount of knowledge when it comes to eye-tracking-while-reading. It was a privilege to work with her on this, and we hope you and your students find it useful!

Happy to share that Liz Schotter and I have just published a beginner-level tutorial introduction to eye-tracking-while-reading studies in Behavior Methods:

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

There are now two weeks to finish your SCiL 2025 submission! Especially excited to see work submitted to the Special Symposium on Computational Pragmatics!