For this interview we spoke to Dr. Fan Bai who was a PhD student at the MPI. We talked about his research, interesting findings and what he wants to do next.

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“Yes, I understand what you are saying,” responds the neural network ChatGPT. “I am a language model designed to understand human language and respond to natural language input. So I’m here to help if you have questions or need anything. What can I do for you?”

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When you think of language or conversation, what comes to your mind is probably chatting with a friend. What makes this conversation possible, though, is actually electrical signals in the brain. So what do electrical signals have to do with conversation?

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For this interview we spoke to Dr. Marloes Mak who was a PhD student at the Radboud University. She talked about her research, interesting findings and what she is doing now.

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Human languages are full of puzzles. For example, why do languages that have different forms for singular and plural nouns usually have shorter singular forms and longer plural forms for most nouns, like flower – flowers in English? Why are you more likely to say, give me my money than give my money to me? Why do languages like Latin or Czech, which have flexible word order, also tend to have case marking? For example, the Latin word liber “book” will have different forms depending on whether you say “The book is interesting” (liber), “I read a book” (librum) or “I found it in a book” (libro).

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