Ted Gibson: The Structure and Purpose of Language

In episode 107 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Ted Gibson. Ted is a Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT. He leads the TedLab, which investigates why languages look the way they do; the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and how people learn, represent, and process language. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pub Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter 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) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe