research
language, meaning, and computation
My work investigates the computations underlying language processing in both biological and artificial systems. I focus on how compositional meaning is constructed incrementally, and on how predictive mechanisms operate over structured representations during comprehension. To address these questions, I draw on evidence from human neural dynamics, behavioral measures of reading, and artificial language models.
Publications
Rodriguez, A., Wang, S., & Pylkkänen, L. (2024). Do Neural Language Models Compose Concepts the Way Humans Can? Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 5309–5314. https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.472/
Rodriguez, A., Flower, N., & Pylkkänen, L. (in prep). Backward surprisal in serial and parallel reading.
Parrish, A., Rodriguez, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (submitted). Non-local conceptual combination. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.11.519989
Presentations
Cataldo, J., Rodriguez, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (2025). Structural priming in comprehension with RPVP. 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. https://2025.neurolang.org/presentation/?id=643
Li, B., Rodriguez, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (2025). An MEG investigation of adjective order preferences as a syntactic constraint in English. 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. https://2025.neurolang.org/presentation/?id=644
Rodriguez, A., Flower, N., & Pylkkänen, L. (2025). Backward surprisal in serial and parallel reading. 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. https://2025.neurolang.org/presentation/?id=647
Rodriguez, A., Flower, N., & Pylkkänen, L. (2024). Backward surprisal can reverse effects of forward surprisal. 2nd Annual Minds, Brains, Machines Poster Symposium.
Rodriguez, A., Wang, S., & Pylkkänen, L. (2024). Do Neural Language Models Compose Concepts the Way Humans Can? 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024).
Rodriguez, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (2023). Non-local phrasal composition in large language models. UC Berkeley’s 7th Annual Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students Symposium.
Parrish, A., Rodriguez, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (2022). Conceptual combination in non-local dependencies. 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.