@LanguageMIT

I am Ted Gibson and I run a language lab at MIT. I tweet about psycholinguistics, cognitive science, language research, linguistics, and words.

 MIT, Cambridge, MA
tedlab.mit.edu/
Joined May 2013
  • Tweets4.8K
  • Following945
  • Followers12.3K
121Media
Very grateful to have received the Gibson/Fedorenko Award at #HSP2026, and sorry I couldn’t attend this year. HSP feels like my academic home, so I’m especially touched. Thank you to the community, organizers, and donors who make it possible! @LanguageMIT @ev_fedorenko
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McGovern Institute
@mcgovernmitJan 22
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/… @NeuroCellPress paper 👉cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S08…
Six fMRI scans showing activity in the cerebellum during language tasks.

ALT Six fMRI scans showing activity in the cerebellum during language tasks.

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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!
Colton Casto@_coltoncastoJan 22
The cerebellum supports high-level language?? Now out in @NeuroCellPress, we systematically examined language-responsive areas of the cerebellum using precision fMRI and identified a *cerebellar satellite* of the neocortical language network! authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUU8… 1/n🧵👇
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Andrea de Varda@devarda_a25 Dec 2025
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@LanguageMIT24 Dec 2025
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_websit…
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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@LanguageMIT24 Dec 2025
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_websit…
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
McGovern Institute
@mcgovernmit11 Dec 2025
The @PNASNews paper by @ev_fedorenko @LanguageMIT + former @mitbrainandcog @ScienceMIT postdocs Sammy Floyd and @OlessiaJour 👇 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.24…

Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: Social conventions, intonation, and world...

Successful communication requires frequent inferences. Such inferences span a multitude of phenomena: from understanding metaphors, to detecting ir...

pnas.org
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
McGovern Institute
@mcgovernmit1 Oct 2025
Words and sentences that are highly dissimilar from anything we’ve seen before are more likely to be remembered accurately, according to research from @ev_fedorenko @GretaTuckute @bj_mdn @thomashikaru @LanguageMIT. mcgovern.mit.edu/2025/10/01/… @mitbrainandcog @ScienceMIT

MIT cognitive scientists reveal why some sentences stand out from others - MIT McGovern Institute

“You still had to prove yourself.” “Every cloud has a blue lining!” Which of those sentences are you most likely to remember a few minutes from now? If you guessed the second, you’re probably...

mcgovern.mit.edu
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
Greta Tuckute@GretaTuckute1 Oct 2025
Paper on word memorability, co-led with @kmahowald and with @phillip_isola @AudeOliva @LanguageMIT @ev_fedorenko: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4016… Paper on sentence memorability, co-led with @thomashikaru and with @bj_mdn @ev_fedorenko: sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Intrinsically memorable words have unique associations with their meanings - PubMed

What makes a word memorable? An important claim from past work is that words are encoded by their meanings and not their forms. If true, then, following rational analysis, memorable words should...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
Thomas Hikaru Clark@thomashikaru31 Jul 2025
1/7 If you're at CogSci 2025, I'd love to see you at my talk on Friday 1pm PDT in Nob Hill A! I'll be talking about our work towards an implemented computational model of noisy-channel comprehension (with @postylem, @LanguageMIT, and @roger_p_levy).
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Moshe Poliak@MoshePoliak5 Aug 2025
(1)💡NEW PUBLICATION💡 Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures Work with Curtis Chen and @LanguageMIT Link to paper: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websit… In memory of Curtis Chen.
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
Sasha Boguraev @COLM26@SashaBoguraev27 May 2025
A key hypothesis in the history of linguistics is that different constructions share underlying structure. We take advantage of recent advances in mechanistic interpretability to test this hypothesis in Language Models. New work with @kmahowald and @ChrisGPotts! 🧵👇
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
Alison Gopnik@AlisonGopnik29 Apr 2025
I'm honored and delighted that I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences today! nasonline.org/news/2025-nas-…

National Academy of Sciences Elects Members and International Members - NAS

WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 120 members and 30 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original...

nasonline.org
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
National Academy of Sciences@theNASciences27 Apr 2025
Accepting the first of two 2025 Troland Research Awards is Evelina Fedorenko of @mitbrainandcog, for groundbreaking contributions and insights into the language network in the human brain. 🧠 #NASaward #NAS162 Watch now: ow.ly/R6gP50VIsih
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
Helen Tager-Flusberg@HelenTager25 Apr 2025
Social Media Post: Today, the newly formed Coalition of Autism Scientists issued our first statement to push back again Robert F. Kennedy, Jr Stand with us as we demand respect for real science and the autism community. eurekalert.org/news-releases…

Coalition of Autism Scientists critiques US Department of Health and Human Services Autism Research...

The newly formed Coalition of Autism Scientists (160 members and counting) today issued a statement in response to remarks and actions taken by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Departm...

eurekalert.org
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
McGovern Institute
@mcgovernmit2 Apr 2025
As a child growing up in the former Soviet Union, @ev_fedorenko studied English, French, German, Polish, and Spanish. Today she is is working to decipher the internal structure and functions of the brain’s language-processing machinery. news.mit.edu/2025/evelina-fe…

Looking under the hood at the brain’s language system

MIT associate professor Evelina Fedorenko studies the brain’s language processing regions: how they arise, how they’re affected by different kinds of input, and how each contributes to language...

news.mit.edu
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
MIT Picower Institute@MIT_Picower2 Apr 2025
Congratulations to Gloria Choi! The Samsung Ho-Am honor recognizes her research on connections between the immune and central nervous systems and their relevance to #autism and other disorders picower.mit.edu/news/gloria-…

Gloria Choi earns Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Medicine

Honor recognizes Choi’s research on connections between the immune and central nervous systems and their relevance to autism and other disorders

picower.mit.edu
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Super excited about Cory's @coryshain work showing that you can recover the language network via func connectivity methods from ~any fMRI data. A massive effort using all the data ever collected in my lab from neurotypical participants! Go, Cory!
Cory Shain@coryshain31 Mar 2025
New brain/language study w/ @ev_fedorenko! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.29.6… . 🧵
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
McGovern Institute
@mcgovernmit18 Mar 2025
A @PNASNews study by @ev_fedorenko @saima_mm finds natural and invented languages elicit similar responses in the brain’s language-processing network. mcgovern.mit.edu/2025/03/18/…
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Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT retweeted
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
@MIT4 Mar 2025
MIT researchers found that legal language is intentionally complex, not for clarity, but to create a false sense of authority. Even lawyers prefer plain English. mitsha.re/iMCm50ValLB

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

An MIT study on “legalese” suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked to write...

news.mit.edu
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MIT Picower Institute@MIT_Picower3 Mar 2025
A decade of studies from labs around the world provide a growing evidence base that increasing the power of the brain’s gamma rhythms could help fight #Alzheimers, and perhaps other, neurological diseases. picower.mit.edu/news/review-… #neuroscience @ScienceMIT @mitbrainandcog

Review: Evidence expanding that 40Hz gamma stimulation promotes brain health

A decade of studies from labs around the world provide a growing evidence base that increasing the power of the brain’s gamma rhythms could help fight Alzheimer’s, and perhaps other, neurological...

picower.mit.edu
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