Psycholinguistics podcasts

Sana Qadar explores the cognitive processes involved in reading and the effects of narrative fiction with Genevieve McArthur, Lili Yu and Raymond Mar. The episode considers literacy difficulties, reading research and the relationship between stories, cognition and wellbeing, alongside readers' personal experiences.

Hosted by Sana Qadar

Linguist Deborah Tannen examines how differences in conversational style create unintended conflict in families, friendships and workplaces, and how greater awareness can improve communication. This release revisits an earlier interview with Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University, and adds a new Your Questions Answered segment in which Emma Levine addresses listener questions about the psychology of lying. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam and published by Hidden Brain Media on 14 September 2026. The official episode page offers public audio, research references and a transcript, with a warning that the transcript may reflect an earlier version.

Hosted by Shankar Vedantam

Psychologist Steven Pinker joins Shankar Vedantam to explore why people communicate indirectly despite learning that honesty is desirable. The conversation examines hedging, softened wording and meanings left unstated, and considers the role these patterns play in human relationships.

Hosted by Shankar Vedantam

Cory Shain discusses efforts to map language processing in individual brains with greater precision. Combining measurements from different recording methods, the research aims to explain how people understand and produce language and to inform future technologies for restoring communication.

Hosted by Nicholas Weiler

Ellie Pavlick examines what it would mean for a language model to understand words. She compares machine and human language processing, discusses the difficulty of explaining black-box predictions, and considers how studying these differences might clarify both artificial intelligence and human knowledge and creativity.

Hosted by Janna Levin, Steven Strogatz

Erich Jarvis compares the neurological and genetic foundations of learned vocal communication across species. In conversation with Janna Levin, he connects human speech with birdsong and other animal vocalizations, considers why vocal learning varies between species, and explores links between speech, movement and dance.

Hosted by Janna Levin

Michael C. Frank discusses early word learning and what children's language development reveals about concepts and social cognition. Topics include open developmental datasets, the interplay of data-driven and theory-driven research, differences from language-model training, and the rational speech act framework for interpreting speakers' intentions.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Andrea Martin develops an account of language that combines compositional structure with physiological constraints from human brains. She discusses neural dynamics and low-dimensional manifolds as a way to connect statistical regularities with formal organization, and considers how this approach relates to the capabilities and limitations of large language models.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks