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

Lex Fridman Podcast

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