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.

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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)