Abstract Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions,
that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from …

As one of the most specific, yet most diverse of human behaviors, language is shaped by
both genomic and extra-genomic evolution. Sharing methods and models between these …

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering
studies--they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' …

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility,
their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to …

I apply a recently emerging perspective on the complexity of action selection, the rate–
distortion theory of control, to provide a computational-level model of errors and difficulties in …

This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order
preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order …

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 …

observed that “island” structures like “Who do you think [NP the gift from__] prompted the
rumor?” or “Who did you hear [NP the statement [S that the CEO promoted__]]?” are not …

In psycholinguistics, the creation of controlled materials is crucial to ensure that research
outcomes are solely attributed to the intended manipulations and not influenced by …

In the last half-decade, the field of natural language processing (NLP) has undergone two
major transitions: the switch to neural networks as the primary modeling paradigm and the …