Tweet fixado
New preprint! 🤖🧠
The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans
👉 osf.io/preprints/psya…
w/ Ferdinando D'Elia, @AndrewLampinen, and @ev_fedorenko (1/6)
English
Andrea de Varda
149 posts
Andrea de Varda
@devarda_a
Postdoc at MIT BCS, interested in language(s) and thought in humans and LMs
Entrou em Mart 2022
509 Seguindo423 Seguidores
Andrea de Varda retweetou
TL;DR: Languages look the way they do because our brains find them easier to handle that way. 🧠✨
Cognition@CognitionJourn
Why do languages share common properties? Adults learned novel quantifiers satisfying semantic universals faster than those violating them. This suggests that learnability helps explain why certain meanings are lexicalized across cultures. @Logic_Cognition
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Language, Intelligence & Thought lab is looking for a lab manager! This is a 2-year postbac position that will allow you to gain experience in human neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI research prior to applying to PhD programs.
Express interest here: forms.gle/289sLgZdJ2bQr1…
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Can we process meaning unconsciously? Our new study suggests: not really… unless language has a way to express it!
New paper out with Andrea Nadalini @D_Casasanto @CrepaldiDavide @BottiniRob
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (plz RT🙏)
What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD!
4 yrs, fully funded, MPI-NL; april 3
mpi.nl/career-educati…
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Short post on what I call the "no-magic approach to understanding intelligent systems" — the philosophy I think of as motivating our work on understanding intelligence without resorting to magical thinking about AI or humans! Link below:
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language
Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20.
Please RT 🙏
mpi.nl/career-educati…
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
My PhD thesis is out 🥳🎓
How do LLMs, trained on trillions of tokens, reason?
Can they generalise beyond their training data or are they constrained by what they've seen before?
My takeaway: they can generalise beyond training in interesting ways, showing genuine reasoning
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Our researchers don't just study the brain - they help young students see themselves as future neuroscientists. @mitbrainandcog research scholar Zadriana Smith + postdoc @HalieOlson recently took time away from their labs to inspire the next generation of neuroscientists! ✨
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
New in @NeuroCellPress! A team including #KempnerInstitute’s @_coltoncasto & @GretaTuckute maps the cerebellum's role beyond motor control as part of an extended language network.🧠🗣️
More here: bit.ly/4rptQ13 #neuroscience #fMRI @harvardmed @HarvardGSAS @ev_fedorenko
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Fed up with hot anecdotal takes on AGI? 🤖🧪
Join us in Warsaw for actual science on how models reason.
📅 Jan 8, Warsaw🔗 Program: manuel-vg.github.io/compositionali…
Featuring @DieuwkeHupkes @MilekPl @leo_bertolazzi @IPrattHartmann @devarda_a and others.
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Andrea de Varda retweetou
I may be a *little* biased but this 📘 is GREAT! If you ever found language structure interesting, but were turned off by implausible+overly complicated accounts, this book is for you: a simple and empirically grounded account of the syntax of natural languages. A must-read!
Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT@LanguageMIT
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website…
English
It's fascinating that you can explain *so much* with dependency distance (effects in language production, comprehension, cross-linguistic differences in word orders, the difficulty of 'legalese'...). Highly recommended!
Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT@LanguageMIT
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website…
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
The last chapter of my PhD (expanded) is finally out as a preprint!
“Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network” 🧠🧐
biorxiv.org/content/10.648…
What is semantic reasoning? Read on! 🧵👇
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Finally out in @PNASNews: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… (Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge–based causal reasoning), with many new analyses (grateful for a thoughtful and constructive review process at PNAS!)
Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦@ev_fedorenko
Thrilled to share this tour de force co-led by SammyFloyd+@OlessiaJour! 8yrs in the making! "A tripartite structure of pragmatic language abilities: comprehension of social conventions,intonation processing,and causal reasoning". W/@ZachMineroff; co-supervised w/@LanguageMIT 1/n
English
Really nice demonstration (led by @DKryvosheieva and @GretaTuckute) that agreement phenomena seem to carve out a shared subspace in LLMs: very different agreement types rely on overlapping units, also across languages!
Greta Tuckute@GretaTuckute
How do LLMs process syntax? Do different syntactic phenomena recruit the same model units, or do they recruit distinct model components? And do different languages rely on similar units to process the same syntactic phenomenon? Check out our new preprint (to appear at ACL 2026)!
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
Look! 👀 Our favorite polygot @ev_fedorenko talks to @QuantaMagazine about the brain's language network and its similarities to LLMs and AI chatbots. 🧠🤖
Bonus photos of postdocs @HalieOlson + @devarda_a!
quantamagazine.org/the-polyglot-n… @mitbrainandcog @sciencemit
English
Andrea de Varda retweetou
What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING information to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna @ev_fedorenko @Nancy_Kanwisher
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
English
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!
English