Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT

Announcements for Open Mind, an MIT Press Open Access journal for Cognitive Science 1. We are now “Diamond” access for the foreseeable future (at least 2 years at this point): this means there are NO CHARGES for publication (or submission, or anything) direct.mit.edu/opmi

MIT researchers @_coltoncasto @ev_fedorenko have found a "satellite" component of the brain’s dedicated language network in the cerebellum, a region better known for coordinating movement. Learn more 👉mcgovern.mit.edu/2026/01/22/lan… @NeuroCellPress paper 👉cell.com/neuron/fulltex…

Could not be more excited about Colton's @_coltoncasto work! A deep dive into the linguistic cerebellum, and a discovery of an area remarkably functionally similar to the core left-hemisphere language areas, including in its selectivity for language. Go Colton and team!

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!

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!

When you find errors in the book, please let me know, so I can correct them for a future edition.

Chapter 10: The rational inference or “noisy-channel” approach to communication in language. See e.g., Levy (2008); Gibson et al (2013).

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…

The @PNASNews paper by @ev_fedorenko @LanguageMIT + former @mitbrainandcog @ScienceMIT postdocs Sammy Floyd and @OlessiaJour 👇 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Invited Speakers: Rosemary Varley, U College, London Anna Papafragou, U Pennsylvania Gary Lupyan, U Wisconsin Cristine Legare, U Texas Austin Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale U Ray Jackendoff, Tufts U Anna Ivanova, Georgia Institute of Tech Jacob Andreas, MIT

Language and thought in minds and machines (supported by the NSF) The relationship between language and thought has been debated and researched across diverse disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science/psychology, neuroscience, and AI.

39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing March 26-28, 2026 hsp2026.org MIT, Cambridge MA, USA. email: info@hsp2026.org Special session: Language and thought in minds and machines Submission deadline: December 12 2025 (Real deadline; no extension)