The 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing was held at MIT, from March 26–28, 2026, with a number of U-M affiliates in attendance.
Linguistics faculty members Jonathan Brennan and Lisa Levinson, along with PhD students James Baybaş, Sid Bhushan, Simón Campos, Xueyang Huang, Sylvan Jesień, Rachel McCullough, Martin Moessmer, George Stain, Elliot Stork, Hsin-Ju Wu, Yueke Zeng, presented a poster titled “Alignment between human reading and large language models varies across word class”. This research originated from a class project in LING 792: Quantitative Methods in Linguistics, in Fall 2025.
Linguistics PhD candidate Junyuan Zhao and Professor Jonathan Brennan also presented a poster titled “LLM-brain alignment is modulated by linguistic structure even under surprisal control”.
The full list of U-M presentations is given below:
- "Alignment between human reading and large language models varies across word class”
Authors: Jonathan Brennan (U-M faculty), James Baybaş (U-M graduate student), Sid Bhushan (U-M graduate student), Noa Segal (U-M graduate student), Simón Campos (U-M graduate student), Xueyang Huang (U-M graduate student), Sylvan Jesień (U-M graduate student), Rachel McCullough (U-M graduate student), Martin Moessmer (U-M graduate student), George Stain (U-M graduate student), Elliot Stork (U-M graduate student), Hsin-Ju Wu (U-M graduate student), Yueke Zeng (U-M graduate student), Lisa Levinson (U-M faculty) - “Effect of co-speech gestures on processing of lexical surprisal during story listening”
Authors: Lauren Salig (U-M postdoc), James Baybaş (U-M graduate student), Hsin-Yuan Fang, Aleksandra Witkowska (U-M research staff), Ziqian Shen (U-M research staff), Jonathan Brennan (U-M faculty), Ioulia Kovelman (U-M faculty), Susan Goldin-Meadow - “LLM-brain alignment is modulated by linguistic structure even under surprisal control”
Authors: Junyuan Zhao (U-M graduate student), Jonathan Brennan (U-M faculty) - “Structural Priming for Implausible Sentences in Interactive Production: The Role of Interlocutors’ Linguistic Competence”
Authors: Lu Sun (U-M graduate student), Julie Boland (U-M faculty)
- “Neural integration of syntactic and visual temporal information in sentence comprehension”
Authors: Ruixi Piao (U-M undergraduate student), Yike Li (U-M graduate student), Cody Cao, David Brang (U-M faculty) - “Distance Modulates Interference from Inappropriate QPs on Pronoun Resolution in Spanish”
Authors: Alba Jorquera, Dave Kush (U-M BA, 2007) - “Structural constraints and event likelihood jointly determine coreference”
Authors: Carla Spellerberg, Brian Dillon, Dave Kush (U-M BA, 2007), Kyle Johnson - “Active Correlative Resolution is Persistent in Hindi”
Authors: Dave Kush (U-M BA, 2007), Sanvi Dubey, Dhruv Mehta - “Online processing of morphosyntactic cues by native and non-native Korean speakers: An eye-tracking study”
Authors: Jeonghwa Cho (U-M PhD, 2024), Gyu-Ho Shin
