cover of episode #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs

#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs

2024/4/17
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Edward Gibson, a psycholinguistics professor at MIT, discusses his early interest in language, sparked by diagramming sentences in school. He transitioned from a background in math and computer science to linguistics, viewing language as a complex puzzle to be solved from an engineering perspective. Gibson found the forms of human language, particularly syntax, to be a more tractable challenge than meaning.

Shownotes Transcript

Edward Gibson is a psycholinguistics professor at MIT and heads the MIT Language Lab. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/edward-gibson-transcript

EPISODE LINKS: Edward's X: https://x.com/LanguageMIT TedLab: https://tedlab.mit.edu/ Edward's Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4FsWE64AAAAJ TedLab's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@Tedlab-MIT

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OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (10:53) - Human language (14:59) - Generalizations in language (20:46) - Dependency grammar (30:45) - Morphology (39:20) - Evolution of languages (42:40) - Noam Chomsky (1:26:46) - Thinking and language (1:40:16) - LLMs (1:53:14) - Center embedding (2:19:42) - Learning a new language (2:23:34) - Nature vs nurture (2:30:10) - Culture and language (2:44:38) - Universal language (2:49:01) - Language translation (2:52:16) - Animal communication