Research
Research in the Gibson Lab (“TedLab”) is aimed at investigating (1) why human languages look the way they do; (2) the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and, most generally, (3) how people learn, represent and process language.
We use a variety of methods, including behavioral experiments (e.g., reading and listening studies, many simple methods in working with remote populations, individual differences studies), statistical modeling and corpus analyses. In collaboration with other labs we also use functional MRI and event-related potentials (ERPs) .
The major lines of research pursued in the lab:
What is the syntax of a human language? I assume the simplest framework that accounts for the available data: dependency grammar.
Information sources and language processing: The informational constraints we have investigated include:
Syntax, Lexicon, World knowledge, Prosody, Pragmatics (inference), Discourse coherence
Information processing and cross-linguistic universals
The relationship between culture and cognition / language
Teaching
9.59J Laboratory in psycholinguistics
9.012 Cognitive science
Publications
Gibson, E. (2025). Syntax: A cognitive approach. MIT Press.
Fedorenko, E., Piantadosi, S. T., & Gibson, E. A. (2024). Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. Nature, 630(8017), 575-586.
Martínez, E., Mollica, F., & Gibson, E. (2022). Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language. Cognition, 224, 105070.
Hahn, M., Futrell, R., Levy, R. & Gibson, E. (2022). A resource-rational model of human processing of recursive linguistic structure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119 (43) e2122602119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2122602119.
Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piantadosi, S.T., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L. & Levy, R. (2019). How Efficiency Shapes Human Language. Trends in Cognitive Science