I should get paid to translate back and forth between classic symbolicist cog sci and Bayesian cog sci. “Agents infer latent causes with evidence from the sensory stream” = people guess what’s going on using abstract representations
This is likely predictable since it’s kinda my niche now, but I find it genuinely shocking that psycholinguists mostly gave up on studying sentence recall and recognition circa 1990 when there were and still are 10000 open questions
We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659
I thought CCG did, or was at least incredibly close to doing so at the level of categorial combination (concatenation). Ignoring whatever the semantic correlate representations are ofc
Not sure if it’s the recipe you’re following, but the serious eats levain “style” chocolate chip cookie recipe is the closest I’ve made. Gets the horizontal, vertical, and craggly aspect of the Levain cookie right with a relatively simple recipe! www.seriouseats.com/super-thick-...
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
Half of my wife’s family speaks a Yue language that makes frequent use of the ɬ phoneme, my current obsession
Almost done grading for the course I (designed! and) taught this semester on connections between verbal working memory, sentence memory, and sentence production. I always thought it was just a cheesy thing to say, but you really do learn more from the students than you teach them
Nothing makes me miss the southwest more than lack of access to puerco en chile verde/puerco asado (red chile). Hope they came out well!
What filling 👀
If anyone is around for SNL down the block from me, I have a sandbox poster on Sunday! I present some very preliminary data examining cued sentence recall with MEG. If you care about sentence recall, MEG sentence production, or combining psycholing with memory tasks, stop by poster E19!
Lau, E. (2025). How single-neuron computation matters for cognitive neuroscience. JoCN Forum. jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/vhhe4nh9
I’ll be presenting a poster at HSP 2025 in about a week. It’s on memory for pronominal clitic placement in Spanish, come stop by and say hi if you can!
It’s so funny when someone does incredibly fancy bayesian cognitive modeling and then their data analysis is just like a frequentist ANOVA lol
Type logical grammars? I guess I can try
Trying to explain the concept of casseroles to my girlfriend and she has immediately stumped me by asking if lasagna is a casserole
Coming up with ever more fucked up theories of syntax phonology semantics to believe, like Tree Adjoining Grammar, Harmonic Serialism, Usage Based Cognitive Semantics
I thought of a really annoying generativist thing to say when someone asks you about doing cross-linguistic studies: well, if you take I-language seriously then nearly every study is “cross-linguistic”
Taking a syntactic formalisms class and I gotta say while MCFGs are cool they also produce some of the ugliest trees out there
We all have that one buddy that’s Lowkey into constraint-based theories but won’t admit it
