In episode 107 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Ted Gibson.

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Outline:

(00:00) Intro

(02:13) Prof Gibson’s background

(05:33) The computational linguistics community and NLP, engineering focus

(10:48) Models of brains

(12:03) Prof Gibson’s focus on behavioral work

(12:53) How dependency distances impact language processing

(14:03) Dependency distances and the origin of the problem

(18:53) Dependency locality theory

(21:38) The structures languages tend to use

(24:58) Sentence parsing: structural integrations and memory costs

(36:53) Reading strategies vs. ordinary language processing

(40:23) Legalese

(46:18) Cross-dependencies

(50:11) Number as a cognitive technology

(54:48) Experiments

(1:03:53) Why counting is useful for Western societies

(1:05:53) The Whorf hypothesis

(1:13:05) Language as Communication

(1:13:28) The noisy channel perspective on language processing

(1:27:08) Fedorenko lab experiments—language for thought vs. communication and Chomsky’s claims

(1:43:53) Thinking without language, inner voices, language processing vs. language as an aid for other mental processing

(1:53:01) Dependency grammars and a critique of Chomsky’s grammar proposals, LLMs

(2:08:48) LLM behavior and internal representations

(2:12:53) Outro

Links:

Ted’s lab page and Twitter

Re-imagining our theories of language

Research — linguistic complexity and dependency locality theory

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies (1998)

The Dependency Locality Theory: A Distance-Based Theory of Linguistic Complexity (2000)

Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentential Complexity (2005)

Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages (2015)

Dependency locality as an explanatory principle for word order (2020)

Robust effects of working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in language-selective cortex (2022)

A resource-rational model of human processing of recursive linguistic structure (2022)

Research — language processing / communication and cross-linguistic universals

Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition (2008)

The communicative function of ambiguity in language (2012)

The rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation (2013)

Color naming across languages reflects color use (2017)

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language (2019)

Read More in  The Gradient