I’m assistant teaching professor (and former postdoc) at the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). I received my BA in Linguistics from UC Davis in 2009, an MA in Linguistics from CSU Fresno in 2013, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Delaware in 2019 (this might be too much linguistics!).
Teaching, outreach, and science communication are my primary focus and my passion. I teach several courses for the undergraduate cog sci major at Rutgers, most centering on language, cognition, and the brain. I also maintain two YouTube channels: one hosts lectures on cognitive science; the other has more informal “edutainment” videos on cognitive science and language related topics.
What’s New?
January 2026
COG SCI SOCIETY MIND CHALLENGE – 1st PLACE!
With the help of Shannon Bryant and Sten Knutsen, I’ve won first prize in the Cog Sci Mind Challenge for the second year in a row!
The challenge, issued by the Cognitive Science Society, was to make an engaging 5-minute educational video aimed at a general audience answering the question How do different minds learn language, if at all? It’s my best video yet!
Check it out on YouTube!
December 2025
LLMs in the news
Our paper on metalinguistic abilities in LLMs has been covered by Wired magazine! Read more here.
December 2025
publication in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
New publication!
In collaboration with
LLMs can do lots of incredible stuff, but there’s a persistent debate about whether they “understand” their outputs, or whether they’re “stochastic parrots“. A lot of debate has centered around “world models”–whether LLMs have structured, internal representations about the world, or whether it’s just diffuse probabilities all the way down.
We take a different approach. We want to know whether LLMs have metalinguistic awareness–knowledge about their knowledge of language (If it sounds meta, that’s because it is!). This is the type of knowledge that linguists use when they engage in linguistic analysis, trying to understand how language itself works.
We test several models with different metalinguistic tests, including drawing syntactic tree diagrams of ambiguous sentences and analyzing novel phonological data sets. This latter test is extremely important, and it parallels the kind of work I’ve done in human subjects–teaching people fake languages to see what they can (and can’t) learn. For LLMs, this is critical. We want to know whether LLMs can make productive inferences about new patterns and not just regurgitate things they’ve seen in their training data (like stochastic parrots!).
Check it out!
January 2025
COG SCI SOCIETY MIND CHALLENGE – 1st PLACE!
I’ve won first prize in this year’s Cog Sci Mind Challenge!
The challenge, issued by the Cognitive Science Society, was to make an engaging 5-minute educational video aimed at a general audience answering the question Why Do our memories Sometimes Fade or Fail? In the video, I take a trip into my own brain to see how memories form and decay.
Check it out on YouTube!
January 2024
Pilot Grant
David Vicario, Mimi Phan, and I have been awarded a $40,000 pilot mini-grant by the Rutgers Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research (CAHBIR)!
The project is a continuation of my AGL work on the subregular hypothesis. Using EEG and fMRI, we are trying to see how the brain responds to “possible” and “impossible” language patterns. Our goal is to see changes in brain activity that correspond to learning, and to see whether those same brain signatures hold for both kinds of language patterns.
May 2023
teaching award
I’ve just been given an award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education at Rutgers University!
The nomination letter included wonderful quotes from students, and it’s been an overwhelming experience. One student admitted that my class was the only one they were willing to take at such an early time of day (8:30am – I don’t like it either!).
Another student described my teaching as “the blueprint” for how a class should be run. I can’t describe how this feels! You can read more about it here.
March 2023
ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
I was invited to give a talk for the E-Talk Series hosted by International Erguvan Art Academy. In the talk, Artificial Languages for Artificial Intelligence, I covered some intriguing recent research on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and the extent to which these AI models do and do not resemble human learners.
The talk was live streamed on YouTube, check it out! 
January 2023
COG SCI SOCIETY MIND CHALLENGE – 2ND PLACE!
With the help of two former students, Maxwell Domanchich and Binghui “Russell” Tang, I won second prize in the Cognitive Science Society’s Mind Challenge!
The challenge was to make an engaging 5-minute educational video aimed at a general audience answering the question Can Machines Think? We had a ton of fun exploring the history and philosophy of this question, although ultimately we decided it doesn’t have a definite answer.
Our video took the second place prize of $500! The video is available on YouTube.
December 2022
publication in THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
New publication!
Enes Avcu and I were invited to give commentary on a target article by Thomas Graf in the journal Theoretical Linguistics. Graf’s article, Subregular linguistics: bridging theoretical linguistics and formal grammar, lays out a case for modeling linguistic computations (of all types!) using the tools of formal language theory. In particular, all of language may consist of structures that can be described as subregular, which would lower our estimate of the upper limit of language complexity substantially!
Enes and I extend this thinking from the theoretical to the neurobiological domain – critically assessing existing neurolinguistic research on language complexity and making the case for increased collaboration across theoretical and experimental fields.
February 2022
publication in language, cognition and neuroscience
New publication!
A collaboration with Enes Avcu, Chao Han, and Arild Hestvik, we test the brain’s sensitivity to within-category phonological contrasts in conditions when phonetic information is variable. What we find is that the presence of an MMN correlates with individual differences in perceptual thresholds – only participants who perceived the contrasts as across-category show a significant MMN effect!
This tells us that the code for representing speech sounds under these conditions really does appear to be a sparse phonological code!
October 2021
Colloquium talk
I gave a colloquium talk at my alma mater Fresno State titled “Learning in the limit: what we can learn about the faculty of language from experimental investigations in formal learning theory”.
In this talk, I give an overview of the artificial grammar learning research I conducted with Enes Avcu and offer some future directions to answer questions about how we learn, represent, and compute phonological patterns of varying degrees of complexity.
August 2021
Assistant teaching professor
I’ve transitioned from a postdoc to an assistant teaching professor at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS)! This is a long-term, non-tenure track position where I get to do what I love – teaching cognitive science and neurolinguistics!
I’m also organizing an informal lab where cognitive science undergrads will help me run studies on artificial grammar learning. We’re going to start with online data collection, but we’re setting up an EEG system and should be able to run EEG experiments by Spring 2022!
May 2021
Publication in Frontiers in communication
An ERP study conducted by Zhiyin Dong, myself, and Arild Hestvik just dropped in Frontiers in Communication. We investigate whether a topic construction in Mandarin is processed in a similar way as filler-gap dependencies in English, and find that the Mandarin parser is sensitive to island constraints!
September 2020
Publication in Psychophysiology
An ERP study conducted by Bilge Palaz, myself, and Arild Hestvik has been published in Psychophysiology. The study – Informative Use of “Not” is N400-Blind – finds that the brain seems to ignore negation in simple sentences, even when those sentences are made more informative in a novel word learning paradigm!
December 2019
Chukchansi language project
Chris Golston and I were interviewed by the local news in Fresno, California to talk about Fresno State’s Chukchansi language documentation and revitalization project. This is a long-running project funded by a million dollar grant to the Linguistics Department at Fresno State from the Chukchansi Tribe.
August 2019
Rutgers Postdoc
I’ve got a postdoc! I’ll be working in the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). The postdoc is unique – affiliated with the center, rather than a lab – and involves both teaching and research!