In our next LangSci talk, Gaurav Kamath,  PhD student in Linguistics at McGill University and Mila, and a member of the McGill University Linguistic Department’s Montreal Quantitative and Computational Linguistics Laboratory, will give a talk on „Measuring Word Meaning Change Across Time and Speaker Age„.

Please note that the hybrid talk will take place at an unusual time and room! In building C7 2, room -1.05 and on MS Teams November 27th at 16:15!

A new journal article by Annemarie Verkerk from C7 has been published in Nature Human Behaviour. The paper, titled „Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses“, investigates global linguistic patterns („universals“) using Grambank and Bayesian analyses, finding statistical proof that about a third of the proposed grammatical universals are supported. This suggests that shared cognitive and communicative pressures guide languages toward similar structures rather than random evolution.

You can access the full article here.

Congratulations on this outstanding achievement!

A paper by members of project A6 has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: „Unexpected words that become your best memories: How sentential constraint and word expectedness affect memory retrieval“ by Gerrit Höltje, Regine Bader, Julia A. Meßmer, Doruntinë Zogaj and Axel Mecklinger.

Access the publication here and the full journal here.

We are very proud to announce that the paper by Ariun-Erdene Tumurchuluun, Yusser Al Ghussin, David Mareček, Josef Van Genabith, Koel Dutta Chowdhury won the best paper award at the Multilingual Representation Learning 2025 WS at EMNLP 2025.

You can find the paper „TenseLoC: Tense Localization and Control in a Multilingual LLM“ here.

Many Congratulations!

In our next LangSci talk, Amanda Yuile,  Research Fellow in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the Mass General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, will give a talk on „The role of event knowledge in children’s reference comprehension„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 20th at 16:15!

As part of its Emmy Noether program, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding Michael Hahn’s work with 1.4 million euros. The project entitled „Understanding and overcoming architectural limitations in neural language models“ will develop new machine learning architectures that make AI systems more robust and logically capable. Current large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are based on the Transformer architecture, which can fundamentally limit their logical reasoning abilities. The project will design model architectures that overcome these limitations and lay methodological foundations for more capable AI systems.

Many congratulations to Michael Hahn on this great accomplishment!

In our first LangSci talk of the semester, George Walkden, Professor of English Linguistics and General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, will give a talk on „Implicational universals and a self-actuating gradient model of morphosyntactic change„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 6th at 16:15!

A paper by members of project B7 has been published in SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpreting, Special issue: Empirical translation and interpreting studies: „Surprisal explains the occurrence of filler particles in simultaneous interpreting“ by Christina Pollkläsener, Maria Kunilovskaya and Elke Teich.

Access the publication here and the full journal here.

Bernd Möbius will give a keynote talk on „Information Density and Phonetic Variation“ at the 28th International Conference „Text, Speech and Dialogue“ in Erlangen/Nürnberg, Germany, Aug 25-28, 2025. You can find the abstract below:

In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit’s negative log probability in a given context). The main hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between information density and phonetic encoding. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant trajectories, plosive voicing, syllable duration, and vowel space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries, in the statistical models that accounted for phonetic effects of changes in surprisal (e.g. Malisz et al. 2018, Brandt et al. 2021). Our findings are generally compatible with a weak version of the Smooth Signal Redundancy (SSR) hypothesis (Aylett & Turk 2004, 2006, Turk 2010), suggesting that the prosodic structure mediates between requirements of efficient communication and the speech signal. However, this mediation is not perfect, as we found evidence for additional, direct effects of changes in predictability on the phonetic structure of utterances. These effects appear to be stable across different speech rates in models fit to data derived from six different European languages (Malisz et al. 2018). Moreover, we investigated effects on subword (segmental and syllable) levels and in local prosodic structures (at phrase boundaries), in acoustically clean and in noisy conditions. Our recent findings suggest that speakers make an effort to increase the difference between syllables in high vs. low surprisal contexts in the presence of noise. No interaction was found between noise and surprisal, suggesting that noise-related modifications may be independent of those induced by surprisal. If so, speech production models should include channel-based as well as message-based formulations: although channel coding is not part of linguistic representation (message formulation) during speech planning, it does shape the phonetic output.

In our next LangSci talk, Kyle Mahowald, Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts, will give a talk on „Linguistic Insights from Language Models„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams July 3rd at 16:15!