Benjamin Bergen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3490385 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Bergen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Bergen |
| SIGNATURE | BERGEN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9395-9151 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Better language models better model the N400, but not reading time
The probability of a word in context, as captured by large language models, is predictive of both behavioral and neural measures of human language processing. Intuitively, language models that are better at next-word prediction might better model predictability effects in human language comprehension. Yet recent work suggests that language models can become too good at next-word prediction to model reading time, implying that the aspects of human…
On the Mathematical Relationship Between Contextual Probability and N400 Amplitude
Accounts of human language comprehension propose different mathematical relationships between the contextual probability of a word and how difficult it is to process, including linear, logarithmic, and super-logarithmic ones. However, the empirical evidence favoring any of these over the others is mixed, appearing to vary depending on the index of processing difficulty used and the approach taken to calculate contextual probability. To help disen…
Does word knowledge account for the effect of world knowledge on pronoun interpretation
To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs) provide an alternative account of how purely ling…
Do Multimodal Large Language Models and Humans Ground Language Similarly
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been criticized for failing to connect linguistic meaning to the world—for failing to solve the “symbol grounding problem.” Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a potential solution to this challenge by combining linguistic representations and processing with other modalities. However, much is still unknown about exactly how and to what degree MLLMs integrate their distinct modalities—and whether the wa…
Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey
Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. De…
The Role of Prosody in Disambiguating English Indirect Requests
Ambiguity pervades language. The sentence “My office is really hot” could be interpreted as a complaint about the temperature or as an indirect request to turn on the air conditioning. How do comprehenders determine a speaker’s intended interpretation? One possibility is that speakers and comprehenders exploit prosody to overcome the pragmatic ambiguity inherent in indirect requests. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment, we find that human l…
A pre-registered, multi-lab non-replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE)
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward ) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave …
Languages are efficient, but for whom
Why do human languages have homophones
When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference
People often speak indirectly. For example, “It’s cold in here” might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders’ inferences about a speaker’s intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker’s mental states, that is, mentalizing? We introduce a mechanistic framework by which mentalizing might be recruited for pragmatic inference and then ask the followin…
Individual Differences in Mentalizing Capacity Predict Indirect Request Comprehension
People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of indirect requests. Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as “Can you turn on the heater?”, but others require substantial additional inference, such as “It’s cold in here.” How do comprehenders make inferences about a speaker’s intentions? And what makes a comprehender more or less successful? Here, we explore the hypothesis that comprehenders do so…
When do language comprehenders mentally simulate locations
Embodied approaches to comprehension propose that understanding language entails performing mental simulations of its content. The evidence, however, is mixed. Action-sentence Compatibility Effect studies (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002) report mental simulation of motor actions during processing of motion language. But the same studies find no evidence that language comprehenders perform spatial simulations of the corresponding locations. This challe…
Disentangling Spatial Metaphors for Time Using Non-spatial Responses and Auditory Stimuli
While we often talk about time using spatial terms, experimental investigation of space-time associations has focused primarily on the space in front of the participant. This has had two consequences: the disregard of the space behind the participant (exploited in language and gesture) and the creation of potential task demands produced by spatialized manual button-presses. We introduce and test a new paradigm that uses auditory stimuli and vocal…
"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters
"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters
"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters
Semantic subtleties like these torture second language learners, feed the imagina-tion of poets, and furnish language mavens with editorial careers. Our aim in the current work is to investigate in some depth what contributes to the selection of one word over another extremely similar word in language use. In particular, the question at hand is whether lexical choices are influenced by differences in the metaphorical patterns that the words in pl…
Embodied Construction Grammar
This chapter focuses on Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), another computational implementation of Construction Grammar. It points out that the driving question of this framework is how language is used in actual physical and social contexts, and explains that ECG is an attempt to computationally model the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie human linguistic behavior. The chapter evaluates the role of mental simulation in processing a…
Grammatical aspect, gesture, and conceptualization: Using co-speech gesture to reveal event representations
Grammatical aspect is a pervasive linguistic device that, according to linguistic analyses, allows speakers to encode different ways of construing events. For instance, the progressive ( I was writing a book ) is thought to reflect increased focus on the internal details of an event, as contrasted with the perfect ( I had written a book ). However, experimental evidence that speakers describing events using progressive versus non-progressive aspe…
The convergent evolution of radial constructions: French and English deictics and existentials
English deictic and existential there -constructions have been analyzed as constituting a single radial category of form—meaning pairings, related through motivated links, such as metaphor (Lakoff 1987). By comparison, existentials and deictic demonstratives in French make use of two distinct radial categories. The current study analyzes the varied senses of French deictic demonstratives ( voilà ‘there is’ and voici ‘here is’) and the existential…
Embodied Verbal Semantics: Evidence from a Lexical Matching Task
The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes
The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes Benjamin K. Bergen The psychological reality of English phonaesthemes is demonstrated through a priming experiment with native speakers of American English. Phonaesthemes are well-represented sound-meaning pairings, such as English gl-, which occurs in numerous words with meanings relating to light and vision. In the experiment, phonaesthemes, despite being noncompositional in nature, displayed priming e…
Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto
The artificial language Esperanto is spoken not only as a second language, by its proponents, but also as a native language by children of some of those proponents. The present study is a preliminary description of some characteristics of the Native Esperanto (NE) of eight speakers, ranging in age from six to fourteen years. As such, it is the first of its kind--previous works on NE are either theoretical treatises or individual case studies. We …
Probability in Phonological Generalizations: Modeling French Optional Final Consonants
Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Aspect (2000)
Markedness and the Evolution of Binary Spatial Deictics: French voila and voici
The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes
The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes Benjamin K. Bergen The psychological reality of English phonaesthemes is demonstrated through a priming experiment with native speakers of American English. Phonaesthemes are well-represented sound-meaning pairings, such as English gl-, which occurs in numerous words with meanings relating to light and vision. In the experiment, phonaesthemes, despite being noncompositional in nature, displayed priming e…
Grammatical aspect, gesture, and conceptualization: Using co-speech gesture to reveal event representations
Grammatical aspect is a pervasive linguistic device that, according to linguistic analyses, allows speakers to encode different ways of construing events. For instance, the progressive ( I was writing a book ) is thought to reflect increased focus on the internal details of an event, as contrasted with the perfect ( I had written a book ). However, experimental evidence that speakers describing events using progressive versus non-progressive aspe…
When do language comprehenders mentally simulate locations
Embodied approaches to comprehension propose that understanding language entails performing mental simulations of its content. The evidence, however, is mixed. Action-sentence Compatibility Effect studies (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002) report mental simulation of motor actions during processing of motion language. But the same studies find no evidence that language comprehenders perform spatial simulations of the corresponding locations. This challe…
The convergent evolution of radial constructions: French and English deictics and existentials
English deictic and existential there -constructions have been analyzed as constituting a single radial category of form—meaning pairings, related through motivated links, such as metaphor (Lakoff 1987). By comparison, existentials and deictic demonstratives in French make use of two distinct radial categories. The current study analyzes the varied senses of French deictic demonstratives ( voilà ‘there is’ and voici ‘here is’) and the existential…
Individual Differences in Mentalizing Capacity Predict Indirect Request Comprehension
People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of indirect requests. Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as “Can you turn on the heater?”, but others require substantial additional inference, such as “It’s cold in here.” How do comprehenders make inferences about a speaker’s intentions? And what makes a comprehender more or less successful? Here, we explore the hypothesis that comprehenders do so…
Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey
Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. De…
When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference
People often speak indirectly. For example, “It’s cold in here” might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders’ inferences about a speaker’s intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker’s mental states, that is, mentalizing? We introduce a mechanistic framework by which mentalizing might be recruited for pragmatic inference and then ask the followin…
Markedness and the Evolution of Binary Spatial Deictics: French voila and voici
Probability in Phonological Generalizations: Modeling French Optional Final Consonants
Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Aspect (2000)
Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto
The artificial language Esperanto is spoken not only as a second language, by its proponents, but also as a native language by children of some of those proponents. The present study is a preliminary description of some characteristics of the Native Esperanto (NE) of eight speakers, ranging in age from six to fourteen years. As such, it is the first of its kind--previous works on NE are either theoretical treatises or individual case studies. We …
Embodied Verbal Semantics: Evidence from a Lexical Matching Task
The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes
The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes Benjamin K. Bergen The psychological reality of English phonaesthemes is demonstrated through a priming experiment with native speakers of American English. Phonaesthemes are well-represented sound-meaning pairings, such as English gl-, which occurs in numerous words with meanings relating to light and vision. In the experiment, phonaesthemes, despite being noncompositional in nature, displayed priming e…
The convergent evolution of radial constructions: French and English deictics and existentials
English deictic and existential there -constructions have been analyzed as constituting a single radial category of form—meaning pairings, related through motivated links, such as metaphor (Lakoff 1987). By comparison, existentials and deictic demonstratives in French make use of two distinct radial categories. The current study analyzes the varied senses of French deictic demonstratives ( voilà ‘there is’ and voici ‘here is’) and the existential…
Embodied Construction Grammar
This chapter focuses on Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), another computational implementation of Construction Grammar. It points out that the driving question of this framework is how language is used in actual physical and social contexts, and explains that ECG is an attempt to computationally model the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie human linguistic behavior. The chapter evaluates the role of mental simulation in processing a…
Grammatical aspect, gesture, and conceptualization: Using co-speech gesture to reveal event representations
Grammatical aspect is a pervasive linguistic device that, according to linguistic analyses, allows speakers to encode different ways of construing events. For instance, the progressive ( I was writing a book ) is thought to reflect increased focus on the internal details of an event, as contrasted with the perfect ( I had written a book ). However, experimental evidence that speakers describing events using progressive versus non-progressive aspe…
Disentangling Spatial Metaphors for Time Using Non-spatial Responses and Auditory Stimuli
While we often talk about time using spatial terms, experimental investigation of space-time associations has focused primarily on the space in front of the participant. This has had two consequences: the disregard of the space behind the participant (exploited in language and gesture) and the creation of potential task demands produced by spatialized manual button-presses. We introduce and test a new paradigm that uses auditory stimuli and vocal…
"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters
"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters
"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters
Semantic subtleties like these torture second language learners, feed the imagina-tion of poets, and furnish language mavens with editorial careers. Our aim in the current work is to investigate in some depth what contributes to the selection of one word over another extremely similar word in language use. In particular, the question at hand is whether lexical choices are influenced by differences in the metaphorical patterns that the words in pl…
When do language comprehenders mentally simulate locations
Embodied approaches to comprehension propose that understanding language entails performing mental simulations of its content. The evidence, however, is mixed. Action-sentence Compatibility Effect studies (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002) report mental simulation of motor actions during processing of motion language. But the same studies find no evidence that language comprehenders perform spatial simulations of the corresponding locations. This challe…
Individual Differences in Mentalizing Capacity Predict Indirect Request Comprehension
People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of indirect requests. Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as “Can you turn on the heater?”, but others require substantial additional inference, such as “It’s cold in here.” How do comprehenders make inferences about a speaker’s intentions? And what makes a comprehender more or less successful? Here, we explore the hypothesis that comprehenders do so…
Why do human languages have homophones
When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference
People often speak indirectly. For example, “It’s cold in here” might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders’ inferences about a speaker’s intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker’s mental states, that is, mentalizing? We introduce a mechanistic framework by which mentalizing might be recruited for pragmatic inference and then ask the followin…
A pre-registered, multi-lab non-replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE)
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward ) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave …
Languages are efficient, but for whom
Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey
Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. De…
The Role of Prosody in Disambiguating English Indirect Requests
Ambiguity pervades language. The sentence “My office is really hot” could be interpreted as a complaint about the temperature or as an indirect request to turn on the air conditioning. How do comprehenders determine a speaker’s intended interpretation? One possibility is that speakers and comprehenders exploit prosody to overcome the pragmatic ambiguity inherent in indirect requests. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment, we find that human l…
On the Mathematical Relationship Between Contextual Probability and N400 Amplitude
Accounts of human language comprehension propose different mathematical relationships between the contextual probability of a word and how difficult it is to process, including linear, logarithmic, and super-logarithmic ones. However, the empirical evidence favoring any of these over the others is mixed, appearing to vary depending on the index of processing difficulty used and the approach taken to calculate contextual probability. To help disen…
Does word knowledge account for the effect of world knowledge on pronoun interpretation
To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs) provide an alternative account of how purely ling…
Do Multimodal Large Language Models and Humans Ground Language Similarly
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been criticized for failing to connect linguistic meaning to the world—for failing to solve the “symbol grounding problem.” Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a potential solution to this challenge by combining linguistic representations and processing with other modalities. However, much is still unknown about exactly how and to what degree MLLMs integrate their distinct modalities—and whether the wa…
Better language models better model the N400, but not reading time
The probability of a word in context, as captured by large language models, is predictive of both behavioral and neural measures of human language processing. Intuitively, language models that are better at next-word prediction might better model predictability effects in human language comprehension. Yet recent work suggests that language models can become too good at next-word prediction to model reading time, implying that the aspects of human…
Computer Science (18 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Natural language processing (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Communication (7 works) · Categorization, perception, and language (5 works)