How listeners infer what was meant
Listeners combine the signal with expectations about both meaning and structure, from word order in Russian and Hindi to misheard song lyrics.
There are many ways to say the same thing.
And the same words can mean different things, depending on how and where they are said. Yet people understand each other remarkably well. I study how: how listeners infer what a speaker meant, and how speakers shape what they say to help them.
Principles of human cognition should hold in every language, so I test them across many, often with undergraduate researchers who run studies in their native languages. I am a PhD student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, advised by Ted Gibson.
CV (PDF) · Email · Google Scholar · Bluesky
Recent studies span English, Russian, Hindi, Italian, and Portuguese, with production experiments in 17 languages and conversation corpora in 22.
Current work
How speakers make informative words stand out
Informative and corrected words are said longer, louder, and at a higher pitch, in every language tested so far, including languages said not to use prosody this way.
How speakers order words for the listener
Speakers save informative words for later in the sentence, when the listener has more context to interpret them.
Old puzzles, communicative answers
Why sentences sound acceptable or not, including syntactic “islands” long cited as evidence for innate grammar, follows from general principles of communication.
For students
Undergraduates are welcome to get involved in research, and no prior experience is needed. Many of the cross-linguistic studies began with students adapting an experiment to their native language. Read how mentoring works and how to reach out, or browse advice on applying to graduate school and learning statistics.
Selected papers
- Poliak, M., Malik-Moraleda, S., & Gibson, E. (2026). Rational language comprehension depends on priors about both meaning and structure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 52(2), 307–322. DOI
- Poliak, M., Chen, C., & Gibson, E. (2025). Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures. Cognition, 265, 106265. DOI
- Poliak, M., Ryskin, R., Braginsky, M., & Gibson, E. (2024). It is not what you say but how you say it: Evidence from Russian shows robust effects of the structural prior on noisy channel inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50(4), 637–649.
‡ undergraduate mentee · All publications