#  Week of Apr 7 

 





April 07, 2025

 

 

## **Hayley Ross Thesis Defence**

Fifth-year student Hayley Ross is defending her thesis on **Wednesday April 16**, at **2:00pm in Boylston Hall 103**. The title and abstract of her thesis can be found below.

**Title**: *Artificial intelligence and fake reefs*: what privative inferences and LLMs tell us about adjective-noun composition

**Abstract**: The fact that people understand completely novel phrases is often taken as an argument that linguistic meaning is composed from the meaning of its parts. Thus, a central concern for the study of meaning is how that meaning is composed, especially for open-class content words like adjectives and nouns. This dissertation studies meaning composition and its interaction with context through the lens of adjective-noun modification and the privative inferences that sometimes result (e.g., a fake gun is (usually) not a gun, and a stone lion is not a (living) lion). This dissertation shows that privativity is not limited to a particular class of adjectives, which leads to a new, non-intersective semantics for adjective-noun modification which handles potential contradictions as part of composition. Further, we find that humans and modern large language models (LLMs) can generalize to the inferences of adjective-noun combinations that they have not seen before. Working with LLMs foregrounds the possibility that these inferences could be drawn by other means than meaning composition, such as memorization or analogy. The resulting adaptation in experiment design as well as reflection on our standards of evidence feeds into the broader, currently emerging discussion about how to study compositionality in humans and language models alike.

## **LangCog** 

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on **Tuesday, April 8 from 5:30-7:00pm**! It will take place in **William James Hall, Room #1550**. The speaker this week is Marc Maffei (BU), and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting, and you can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on their [website](https://sites.harvard.edu/langcog/).

**Title**: Beyond Words: Oral Motor Skills and Language Development

**Abstract**: Predicting language outcomes in children with early language concerns is a longstanding clinical challenge that often results in the delayed implementation of intervention. In this talk, I will discuss my work (1) quantifying oral motor function and (2) examining associations between oral motor function and language skills in pediatric populations including autistic children and late talkers. An improved understanding of these relationships will advance clinicians’ ability to make informed prognoses of language outcomes and will inform future research aimed at improving the assessment and treatment of language disorders.



 

 

 



 

 

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