The 2025 symposium took place in the Michigan League Ballroom on Friday, March 21, 2025.
The 2025 theme was What do large language models tell us about human language? Three big claims have dominated the last half century of thinking in cognitive science about language. First, language relies on a system of abstract syntactic rules and principles. Second, these rules and principles are too complex to be learned by children without an innate linguistic faculty. Third, developing competence in language requires social interaction grounded in the real world. The last few years have seen the advent of large language models, neural networks that learn to produce fluent language “from scratch”, trained on data from the internet. Do large language models force us to reconsider any of these big claims, and if so, how should we revise our understanding of language? The 2025 Weinberg Symposium featured three world-leading experts who will discuss and debate these questions.
_________________________________________________________________________
About the Marshall M. Weinberg Symposium
Held annually at the University of Michigan, the Marshall M. Weinberg Symposium provides an interdisciplinary forum that attracts leading scholars, researchers, and students from a variety of disciplines to examine the science behind significant and timely issues in cognitive science. The overall aim of the Symposium is to advance the reciprocal flow of ideas across fields in cognitive science, broadly understood to include neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The Symposium includes a keynote address, presentations by leaders in the field, student poster session, panel discussion, reception, and ample time for participant and student interaction.
Past symposia have explored such topics as artificial intelligence, bilingual brain research, the rationality of thought, the cognitive science of moral minds, and the use of neuroscience data in legal judgments, among others. The first Weinberg Symposium was held at U-M in 2009.
