utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing) header
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PhD candidate @ University of Maryland stats and psycholing janissary fan of decomposing and phrasal spellout https://xitter.gq/t.co/cxuAYy6Z32

Washington, DC
Joined April 2018
Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)Photo by utku turk (@UtkuTurkLing)
Does my laptop weight more when its disk is full, what are the consequences of using 1s and 0s for information? A short, silly post on why invoking Marr's levels does not free you from the constraints of other levels: utkuturk.com/posts/marr-and-…
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Just starting a reading group this week!
Have you gotten your FREE (for non-commercial uses, including Butlerian Jihad) PDF of Bayesian Workflow? The second half of the book is detailed case studies. avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-…
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The preprint now includes a self paced reading experiment in Turkish, and through comparison of Czech "null" vs. Russian surprising case-ambiguity results in the light of no evidence for phonological modulation. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dw…
New preprint: psyarxiv.com/dwh8v! We know surface/phonological overlap can matter for reading & memory. But does it bleed into dependency resolution? In English, “pseudo-plurals” like /s/ in *cruise* don’t induce agreement errors—but Russian ones have been argued to. (1/3)
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another blog post: utkuturk.com/posts/bayesian-… this time on bimodality in person marking. i use turkish honorific addressee agreement on the verb (same as plural) and implement jammalamadaka & jin’s (2021) bayesian mode test in r (from scratch)
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new blog post: utkuturk.com/posts/bayesian-… ! i want both tables and the coefficient whisker plots, but i dont like how many things just cut through the text. so, i wrote an automated script that makes nice tables with whisker plots in tikz.
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people think that I am only harsh on their topic and talk. here's my take on experimentation, and the people's misleading trust in them. I feel like alchemy is a good allegory and a reminder for all of us to think. utkuturk.com/posts/alchemy/
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Will be in Boston until the Sunday for HSP, would be happy to meet with folks that is around!
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Have you ever wondered when Lunar New Year - Ramadan - Ash Wednesday is going to be on the same day? It is 3571. And after next year, the next time they are going to be in the same week is 2127. Here's the code for it: colab.research.google.com/dr…
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New blog post: utkuturk.com/posts/clip/ Ran an analysis on whether some of the pictures used in previous advanced planning is sus. Used a CLIP similarity model to quantify picture<->target sentence similarity and how difficult to get the subject from the picture.
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I do not want to hype anyone about what LLMs are doing or what they can tell us. as I say in the blog post, what these models are doing and what humans are doing is of course different.
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(side note the bayesian analysis including an ordered model is ran with pyro)
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New preprint: psyarxiv.com/dwh8v! We know surface/phonological overlap can matter for reading & memory. But does it bleed into dependency resolution? In English, “pseudo-plurals” like /s/ in *cruise* don’t induce agreement errors—but Russian ones have been argued to. (1/3)
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An alternative: it’s not phonology, rather controller-eligibility. Turkish provides a test: the same suffix appears on nouns and verbs, both can be subjects, but only nouns can control agreement. If “looks plural” drives retrieval, plural-marked verbs should attract too. (2/3)
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They don’t. Across two experiments: nominal plural attractors reliably induced attraction, while plural verbal attractors don’t—despite identical surface -lAr. Takeaway: agreement retrieval is gated by controllerhood, and surface heuristics do not bleed into retrieval. (3/3)
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Are most sentences unique? I investigated the Chomskyan claim (as summarized by @sapinker) using some corpora, inspired by a conversation with @langofmind: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19108
Replying to @hiramring
Yeah, I was thinking exact matches. Trying to see if anyone has quantified Chomsky's claim that most of the sentences we hear are novel
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I changed my website and have been writing blogposts about linguistics and tutorials on experiments: utkuturk.com. Here's some recent ones, feel free to comment and disagree or circulate to people who would disagree (which is one of the most things in linguistics)!
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a frustration post on unsolicited 'this is ungrammatical to me' comments when someone gives a linguistic talk, and an attempt to be charitable: utkuturk.com/posts/futilenes…
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how to generate experimental pictures that has a consistent style using ai: utkuturk.com/posts/generate-…
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