Andrea de Varda
@andreadevarda.bsky.social
Pinned
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
Computational psycho/neurolinguistics is lots of fun, but most studies only focus on English. If you think cross-linguistic evidence matters for understanding the language system, consider submitting an abstract to MMMM 2026!
November 21, 2025 at 1:17 AM
Computational psycho/neurolinguistics is lots of fun, but most studies only focus on English. If you think cross-linguistic evidence matters for understanding the language system, consider submitting an abstract to MMMM 2026!
Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
November 19, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026!
If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply!
PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply!
PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
November 14, 2025 at 4:40 PM
🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026!
If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply!
PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply!
PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
New preprint! w/@drhanjones.bsky.social
Adding human-like memory limitations to transformers improves language learning, but impairs reading time prediction
This supports ideas from cognitive science but complicates the link between architecture and behavioural prediction
arxiv.org/abs/2508.05803
Adding human-like memory limitations to transformers improves language learning, but impairs reading time prediction
This supports ideas from cognitive science but complicates the link between architecture and behavioural prediction
arxiv.org/abs/2508.05803
Human-like fleeting memory improves language learning but impairs reading time prediction in transformer language models
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, para...
arxiv.org
August 18, 2025 at 12:40 PM
New preprint! w/@drhanjones.bsky.social
Adding human-like memory limitations to transformers improves language learning, but impairs reading time prediction
This supports ideas from cognitive science but complicates the link between architecture and behavioural prediction
arxiv.org/abs/2508.05803
Adding human-like memory limitations to transformers improves language learning, but impairs reading time prediction
This supports ideas from cognitive science but complicates the link between architecture and behavioural prediction
arxiv.org/abs/2508.05803
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵
New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, @spiantado.bsky.social, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social
1/8
New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, @spiantado.bsky.social, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social
1/8
Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language
Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...
tinyurl.com
August 3, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵
New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, @spiantado.bsky.social, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social
1/8
New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, @spiantado.bsky.social, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social
1/8
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
Next week I’ll be in Vienna for my first *ACL conference! 🇦🇹✨
I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️
🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)
I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️
🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)
July 24, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Next week I’ll be in Vienna for my first *ACL conference! 🇦🇹✨
I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️
🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)
I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️
🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
I'm sharing a Colab notebook on using large language models for cognitive science! GitHub repo: github.com/MarcoCiappar...
It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵
It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵
July 18, 2025 at 1:40 PM
I'm sharing a Colab notebook on using large language models for cognitive science! GitHub repo: github.com/MarcoCiappar...
It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵
It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
📢 New paper out! We show that auditory iconicity is not marginal in English: word sounds often resemble real-world sounds. Using neural networks and sound similarity measures, we crack the myth of arbitrariness.
Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.3...
@andreadevarda.bsky.social
Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.3...
@andreadevarda.bsky.social
Cracking arbitrariness: A data-driven study of auditory iconicity in spoken English - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Auditory iconic words display a phonological profile that imitates their referents’ sounds. Traditionally, those words are thought to constitute a minor portion of the auditory lexicon. In this articl...
link.springer.com
July 4, 2025 at 12:16 PM
📢 New paper out! We show that auditory iconicity is not marginal in English: word sounds often resemble real-world sounds. Using neural networks and sound similarity measures, we crack the myth of arbitrariness.
Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.3...
@andreadevarda.bsky.social
Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.3...
@andreadevarda.bsky.social
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint.
Generate a…
- Python program that passes a test suite.
- PDDL plan that satisfies a goal.
- CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward.
The list goes on…
How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇
Generate a…
- Python program that passes a test suite.
- PDDL plan that satisfies a goal.
- CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward.
The list goes on…
How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇
May 13, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint.
Generate a…
- Python program that passes a test suite.
- PDDL plan that satisfies a goal.
- CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward.
The list goes on…
How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇
Generate a…
- Python program that passes a test suite.
- PDDL plan that satisfies a goal.
- CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward.
The list goes on…
How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network**
with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n 🧵
with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n 🧵
The cerebellar components of the human language network
The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...
www.biorxiv.org
April 21, 2025 at 3:19 PM
New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network**
with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n 🧵
with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n 🧵
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
PINEAPPLE, LIGHT, HAPPY, AVALANCHE, BURDEN
Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that?
In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj
Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that?
In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj
APA PsycNet
tinyurl.com
April 10, 2025 at 2:38 PM
PINEAPPLE, LIGHT, HAPPY, AVALANCHE, BURDEN
Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that?
In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj
Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that?
In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
Excited to share new work on the language system!
Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/
Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below!👇🧵
Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/
Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below!👇🧵
The extended language network: Language selective brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered
Although language neuroscience has largely focused on core left frontal and temporal brain areas and their right-hemisphere homotopes, numerous other areas - cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar - ha...
biorxiv.org
April 3, 2025 at 9:07 PM
Excited to share new work on the language system!
Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/
Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below!👇🧵
Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/
Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below!👇🧵
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
New brain/language study w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI scanning in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025... . 🧵
A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of over 1,000 human brains doing arbitrary tasks
A century and a half of neuroscience has yielded many divergent theories of the neurobiology of language. Two factors that likely contribute to this situation include (a) conceptual disagreement…
doi.org
March 31, 2025 at 3:19 PM
New brain/language study w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI scanning in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025... . 🧵
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
1/n Happy to share a new paper with Calogero Zarbo & Marco Marelli! How well do LLMs represent the implicit meaning of familiar and novel compounds? How do they compare with simpler distributional semantics models (DSMs; i.e., word embeddings)?
doi.org/10.1111/cogs...
doi.org/10.1111/cogs...
Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words With Contextualized Word Embeddings
Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLM...
doi.org
March 19, 2025 at 2:07 PM
1/n Happy to share a new paper with Calogero Zarbo & Marco Marelli! How well do LLMs represent the implicit meaning of familiar and novel compounds? How do they compare with simpler distributional semantics models (DSMs; i.e., word embeddings)?
doi.org/10.1111/cogs...
doi.org/10.1111/cogs...
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
So excited to have our work on conlangs out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Congrats, Saima, Maya, and the rest of the crew -- well done!
Here is the MIT news story:
news.mit.edu/2025/esperan...
Here is the MIT news story:
news.mit.edu/2025/esperan...
To the brain, Esperanto and Klingon appear the same as English or Mandarin
MIT research finds the brain’s language-processing network also responds to artificial languages such as Esperanto and languages made for TV, such as Klingon on “Star Trek” and High Valyrian and Dothr...
news.mit.edu
March 18, 2025 at 2:35 PM
So excited to have our work on conlangs out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Congrats, Saima, Maya, and the rest of the crew -- well done!
Here is the MIT news story:
news.mit.edu/2025/esperan...
Here is the MIT news story:
news.mit.edu/2025/esperan...
Reposted by Andrea de Varda
New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language?
Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)
Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)
March 12, 2025 at 2:31 PM
New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language?
Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)
Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)
New preprint! 🧠🤖
Brain encoding in 21 languages!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
w/ Saima Malik-Moraleda, @gretatuckute.bsky.social , and @evfedorenko.bsky.social (1/)
Brain encoding in 21 languages!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
w/ Saima Malik-Moraleda, @gretatuckute.bsky.social , and @evfedorenko.bsky.social (1/)
Multilingual Computational Models Reveal Shared Brain Responses to 21 Languages
At the heart of language neuroscience lies a fundamental question: How does the human brain process the rich variety of languages? Recent developments in Natural Language Processing, particularly in m...
www.biorxiv.org
February 4, 2025 at 6:03 PM
New preprint! 🧠🤖
Brain encoding in 21 languages!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
w/ Saima Malik-Moraleda, @gretatuckute.bsky.social , and @evfedorenko.bsky.social (1/)
Brain encoding in 21 languages!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
w/ Saima Malik-Moraleda, @gretatuckute.bsky.social , and @evfedorenko.bsky.social (1/)