Is there something special about minds & brains of polyglots? Yes, polyglots use fewer neural resources to process their native language. Evidence for more efficient language processing(?). A new paper at Cerebral Cortex, with Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦, I.A.B academic.oup.com/cercor/advance…

Excited about our new paper on brain "markers" of autism just published in Autism Research, in collaboration with Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦, Alex Kell, AJ Haskins, Nancy Kanwisher @[email protected]. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

What fun to be introduced by my former postdoc @davidjpitcher for this graduation speech at the University of York. I discuss privilege, luck, and compassion in science and life: youtube.com/watch?v=ZiAM8h…

THE AMAZING VACCINE RACE CANADA

My current state now. I've been trying to book an appointment for AZ since Monday with no luck so far.

On the anniversary of my mother Elizabeth (McPhedran) Gibson’s death, I would like to announce two new Human Sentence Processing (HSP) conference awards: the McPhedran-Fedorenko awards for junior researchers.

Do perceptual experiences that bilinguals encounter when learning words in each language impact how these words are represented in semantic memory? Yes, they do. New work in collaboration with Xuan Pan, Andy Xiong, and Debra Jared cambridge.org/core/journals/…

We are allowed to rigorously critique each others' work. We are also allowed to be kind. The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are more effective when they occur together. And this is all I will say about this week's pile on.

Zelensky addressing the Russian people in Russian now: “Today I initiated a phone call with the president of the Russian Federation. The result was silence, though the silence should be in the Donbas. As a result I want to address all citizens of Russia…

🇺🇦 That’s how a father in Ukraine sent his family to the safe zone and said goodbye to the camera.

Putin is a small man with Napoleon complex, increasingly isolated. The Russian state speaks only in Orwellian doublespeak. This will be the beginning of the end for Putin.

One of my all-time favourites. Stare at the red dot on the woman's nose for 30 seconds, then look at an empty wall while blinking quickly. Promise it's worth it... bit.ly/2UbzN7W

New paper with Sammy Floyd, Olessia Jouravlev, Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦, Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT! Non-literal language understanding is an essential part of communication. But what is the role of mentalizing vs. language statistics in pragmatics? & how well do NLP models capture human prag behaviors? 🧵1/6

My favourite study of "how often does a family with small children get a respiratory infection?" is this one, from the USA: doi.org/10.1093/cid/ci… Children <5y have one of 16 common respiratory viruses detected in a nasal swab 50% of the year!

Have you ever met someone who speaks 5+ (sometimes several dozen!) languages and wondered how all these languages coexist in their brain? In Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦’s lab, we've studied the brains of this unique population. Here’s what we found. Pre-print: tinyurl.com/2p8kf8vy 🧵Below

Here's my conversation with Edward Gibson (Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT), a linguist and psychologist at MIT, heading the MIT Language Lab. We talk all about the human language: syntax, grammar, structure, theories of language, evolution of language, how it reflects culture, and of course LLMs,