Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition through three distributional properties: high frequency, re...

Prosody—the melody of speech—conveys critical information often not captured by the words or text of a message.In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify how much is conveyed by prosody that is not recoverable from text alone, and, crucially, what prosody conveys.Our...

A recent study (CITATION) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language models (LLMs). This raises the question of whether such advantages of intern...