Week of Sept 22

Aleksic in Gazatte 

Adam Aleksic (BA '23), a graduate in Linguistics and Government, is recently interviewed by The Harvard Gazette to talk about his recently published book Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. Adam is also an influencer on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube known as the Etymology Nerd. 

Read the Gazette article here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/our-viral-vocabulary/. 

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting will be Tuesday, 9/23 from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Wednesday Bushong (Wellesley), and the title and abstract of their talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. 

Title: How do listeners represent linguistic information during real-time processing?

Abstract: Spoken language understanding requires listeners to infer abstract linguistic units (phonemes, words, etc.) from a temporally fleeting, high-dimensional signal. Traditional psycholinguistic theories contend that listeners must process speech in a radically incremental manner, making categorization judgments as quickly as possible while discarding lower-level gradient information about the speech signal. However, there is now substantial evidence that listeners can maintain at least some gradient information about previous speech input. My lab investigates what kind of representations listeners maintain about past input, and how they integrate those representations with current input to form a coherent percept. In this talk, I will discuss three recent studies from my lab. Studies 1-2 investigate how listeners integrate acoustic and semantic information across time by comparing human behaviour to normative models of multi-cue integration. Study 3, using methods from the perceptual decision-making literature, aims to pinpoint what level of detail listeners maintain about speech input over time.