** This ELiTU talk will take place on a Tuesday from 15:30-16:30. ** Abstract: Generative large language models (LLMs) produce unconstrained text with few grammatical errors. This is surprising in view of what is known as “the logical problem of language acquisition.” We assessed the linguistic competence of LLMs by asking them for judgments like one…

** This ELiTU talk will take place on a Monday from 16:00-17:00 instead of the regular time. ** Discourse is structured by coherence relations: logical connections between propositions such as causality, contrast, and temporal sequences (Sanders, Spooren & Noordman, 1992). These relations are often explicitly marked by connectives such as “because,” “although,” and “after” (Knott,…

** This ELiTU talk will take place from 13:00-14:00 instead of the regular time. ** Abstract: Dementia is a highly prevalent neurodegenerative disease, making early diagnosis a key priority for healthcare professionals to ensure timely and targeted care is provided. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a promising and cost-efficient tool for such early diagnosis. However, existing EEG-based…

** This ELiTU talk will take place from 13:00-14:00 instead of the regular time. ** Kohei Haneda (International Doctorate for Experimental Approaches to Language And Brain, University of Groningen, Macquarie University, and University of Potsdam),Anja Schüppert (University of Groningen),Roel Jonkers (University of Groningen),and Anita Szakay (Macquarie University) Abstract: Comprehenders can capitalize on non-linguistic visual information to…

NB: Buhan will present remotely, but the meeting will be streamed in room 0.19 Joint work with Nino Grillo (University of York), Sven Mattys (University of York), Andrea Santi (UCL), Shayne Sloggett (University of York), and Giuseppina Turco (CNRS – Université Paris Cité) Language comprehension is a highly incremental process, as shown by ambiguity resolution and the processing of syntactic…

Co-authors: Bob van Tiel & Peter de Swart. This presentation explores the assignment of commitments in conversation. While theoretical work has explored the range of commitment-bearing acts, key questions remain unresolved, such as the role of addressees, the gradability of commitment, and the effect of evidentials. To empirically address these questions, we propose facial electromyography…

Joint work with Andrea Santi (UCL), Fani Karageorgou and Shayne Sloggett (University of York) Many current models of sentence comprehension employ a content addressable memory architecture which does not privilege structural information [1–5]. A seminal finding comes from [2], who suggest that even nouns outside the current sentential context interfere with the formation of intra-sentential…

Gabriel Carlin-Coleman Title: Computer mouse movements can replicate reading behaviour from eye tracking studies: evidence from syntactic and semantic interference effects Abstract: This study investigates the effectiveness of ‘mouse tracking for reading’ (MoTR), a novel incremental processing paradigm developed by Wilcox et al. (2024). MoTR adapts the procedure of eye-tracking tasks but allows implementation over…

A much-debated question in linguistics is whether learning language requires a language-specific learning capacity or can arise from input alone. Neural language models (NLMs) can greatly influence this debate as they learn solely from input and their inductive biases, without built-in linguistic representations. Recent work has examined how NLM’s handle various grammatical phenomena, including syntactic…

** This talk is organized in collaboration with the Syntax Interface Lectures Utrecht (SIL) ** Grammatical aspect in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and English: Insights from experimental studies This talk addresses important theoretical issues concerning grammatical aspect in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and English. Three experimental studies on L1 and L2 processing of grammatical aspect are then presented. L1 processing of…