Topic: language learning

Tal Linzen, an associate professor of linguistics and data science at New York University and a research scientist at Google, will speak in MIT's Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence seminar series. His work combines behavioral experiments and computational methods to study language learning and comprehension, alongside large-language-model post-training, evaluation, and interpretability.

Katharina Gensch discusses interviews with older adults attending English classes in Berlin. Participants respond differently to the spread of English, from welcoming international urban life to experiencing exclusion or ageism. The study examines language learning as a strategy for participating in changing neighbourhoods and the communicative demands of multilingual cities.

Research has identified structural differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in brain regions underlying language, and memory. This is consistent with the Declarative/Procedural language model, which proposes that hippocampal-based and basal ganglia-based networks subserve language learning and processing.Whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity (FC) of bilateral hippocampi and caudate nuclei was analyzed in 117 participants with diverse multilingual language experience, to assess relationships of FC with performance on verbal declarative memory and procedural memory tasks, and