Morten H. Christiansen

I am very saddened to see Cornell comply with the Trump administration’s dictatorial demands. @cornellaaup.bsky.social provides a careful analysis of the potential dire consequences of this capitulation

Social Context Matters for Turn‐Taking Dynamics: A Comparative Study of Autistic and Typically Developing Children Engaging in fluent conversation is a surprisingly complex task that requires interlocutors to promptly respond to each other in a way that is appropriate to the social context. In this study, we dise...

Conversational turn-taking feels effortless, but it's a complex dance. We find social context—who you're talking to and what you're talking about—fundamentally changes conversational dynamics in both autistic & TD children. 1/

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... w @chrismmcox.bsky.social

We have a paper in preparation with more experiments, of which we discuss part of one of them in the Linguistics Vanguard paper

Indeed, though our experiments indicate that 'vanilla' versions without RLHF (and even 'instruct' ones) are not fully able to use this information to generate human-like language. Human feedback may be needed to "unlock" it -- at least when it comes to producing human-level grammatical language?

Ross D. Kristensen-McLachlan, Pablo Contreras Kallens and I suggest that the introduction of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback provides much need socially informed feedback and that this makes their linguistic behavior more human-like (including human errors) 2/2

Curious? The article is OA

LLMs highlight the importance of interaction in human language learning Recent years have seen large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance with core linguistic abilities. This can be taken as a demonstration that, contrary to long-held assumptions about in...

Human language acquisition and use is fundamentally interactive. By contrast, LLMs are generally assumed to be passive learners that merely soak up vast amounts of data, like a sponge. In this opinion piece, we argue that the picture is more nuanced 1/2

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Know someone whose excellence in research and contributions to the CogSci community should be recognized? Nominate them to be a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society!

Deadline: Nov 1
More info: cognitivesciencesociety.org/fellows/

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

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_...

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

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

3/3

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

2/3

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...

🧵 1/3

Language Evolution

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...

🏅 💬 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.

📣 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

📌

a downloading bar showing a percentage of 55 percent Alt: a downloading bar showing a percentage of 55 percent

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

4/4

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

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.

3/4

A depiction of the traditional view of structural priming

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.

2/4

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.

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...

🧵1/4

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

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

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...

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)

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/

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...

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...
2/2

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
1/2

A meme showing the American public favoring Helen Keller over Laura Bridgman

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.
5/5

Monkey with arms on it's head, indicating despair

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.
4/5

A meme illustrating the McGurk effect, where auditory "Ba" plus visual "Ga" yields the perception of "Da"

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".
3/5