“I will do it tomorrow,” said Toad. “Today I will take life easy.”

Look what just arrived early! It’s chunkier than I thought. Open access version on publication day which I think is the 18th on the @mitpress.bsky.social website. I must admit, I’m very fond of the colour!!! 🐦🐦 #syntax #newbook

Why should you study linguistics? My six year old just asked me how “we make voice out of air.”

6 y.o., out of context: Is Santa super rich?

Tamar is a great mentor/scholar and she is one of the major reasons I am still in academia. Great opportunity

The relationship between tense and complementizer is really puzzling…

The following article is now in press at Psychological Review. Interested to hear what people think! "The successes and failures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) highlight the importance of innate linguistic priors for human language acquisition".

osf.io/preprints/ps... via

✨New preprint out!
With Faruk Akkus and @linguistbrian.bsky.social
We show robust evidence for the rapid use of hierarchical relations in memory retrieval.
👉3 VW studies on the Turkish reciprocal
👉More looks to c-commanding subjects & indirect objects than to distractors
osf.io/preprints/ps...

lol People, get disillusioned by the illusion illusion

5 y.o: What does "memory" mean?

me, a cognitive scientist: (excellent question, let me try to come up with a necessary and sufficient condition for 'memory'....... oh no, my kid is about to lose interest...) ... well, it means "記憶" (memory in Japanese).

My partner and me: 🤦

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out

(1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object.

(2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers.

nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits (1-year extension possible). Research topic open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching until Summer 2027, light teaching after that (English). Official ad soon. Please share 🙏

How do memory retrieval and prediction work together during sentence comprehension?
We use computational modelling and visual world eye-tracking to unpack their interaction in German pronouns. New article led by Elise Oltrogge, together by João Veríssimo, and Umesh Patil: doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123