Lars Meyer

Lars Meyer

@languagecycles.bsky.social

Investigating and teaching neurobiology of language @ JGU Mainz, MPI Leipzig, & UK Münster; PI, ERC CoG BALANG & DFG 529614204 & 546844207 & G-BA 01VSF24036; Editor, "The Rhythms of Speech and Language" (CUP); Associate Editor, The Journal of Neuroscience

624 followers174 following66 posts

Lars Meyer
@languagecycles.bsky.social

104 MEG data sets and counting—http://languagecycles.com/home/tlpp/! If you live in the Leipzig area and speak *one of the 25 languages indicated on the website*, get in touch with Team LPPC.

Lars Meyer reposted

Nicola Molinaro
@nicolaml.bsky.social

🔊 New preprint. Speech timing is never regular — syllables stretch, phonemes arrive early or late. That variability is usually averaged away as noise. We asked whether the brain treats it as information instead. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.orgThe cortex encodes speech timing as departure from expectation across multiple timescalesEvery syllable and every phoneme in natural speech has a different duration. This variability is conventionally treated as jitter, noise the brain must overcome to recover an underlying regularity. He...
Lars Meyer
@languagecycles.bsky.social

Work with Philipp K. – he is a very knowledgeable and kind man.

Philipp Kanske@kanske.bsky.social

Wir suchen Verstärkung - job alert 🎺 PhD- oder PostDoc-Stelle an der TU Dresden im Bereich der klinisch-sozialen Neurowissenschaft mit Mitarbeit am @trr393.bsky.social und in der Lehre. Text me if interested. - Please share - @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social @tudresden.bsky.social

Lars Meyer reposted

Yifei He 何奕菲
@yifeihe.bsky.social

Very happy that our manuscript with my brilliant collaborators @jamestrujillo.bsky.social and @straubeb.bsky.social is now published @jneurolang.bsky.social. 🥳🥳🥳 Interested in gesture, discourse, fMRI, prediction, computational modeling? This is the paper for you 👇 doi.org/10.1162/NOL....

doi.orgDiscourse context and co-speech gestures jointly shape hierarchical prediction during the processing of a multimodal narrativeAbstract. Understanding one another in daily communication depends on predicting language from prior discourse context and visual signals, such as co-speech gestures. However, it remains unclear how d...
James Trujillo @jamestrujillo.bsky.social

When listening to a story, earlier parts of the story (context) and the speaker's gestures help us predict and understand what they are saying. In a new preprint we show context and gestures have a push-pull synergy on neural response to linguistic information 👇🧵

Lars Meyer reposted

Valentina Borghesani
@vborghesani.bsky.social

This is not a drill ⚠️ The abstract submission deadline is around the corner and you should all be planning your trip to Geneva.🇨🇭Get in touch if you have questions or comments.

SNL Annual Meeting@snlmtg.bsky.social

Don't miss the latest episode of @smwilson.bsky.social's Language Neuroscience Podcast with @rmc-law.bsky.social and @vborghesani.bsky.social teasing the program of #SNL2026! 🍏 open.spotify.com/episode/0zAE... 🍎 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

open.spotify.comSNL 2026 teaser with Valentina Borghesani and Ryan Law

Lars Meyer reposted

Keith B. Doelling
@kbdoelling.bsky.social

🚨 Post-doc Job ALERT! Interested in using AI to better understand how the brain enjoys music? Or how auditory processing changes in Hearing Loss? Want to eat your weight in 🥖, 🧀, and 🍷? Click on this! #neurojobs, #blackinneuro, #neuroskyence, #psychjobs research.pasteur.fr/en/job/postd...

research.pasteur.frPostdoctoral Position in AI, Machine Learning and Auditory Neuroscience - ResearchParis, France | Institut de l’Audition (Institut Pasteur)Duration: 24 months (flexible start)Supervisor: Keith Doelling (INSERM) About the position We are recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to focus...

Lars Meyer reposted

Sophie Slaats
@sophieslaats.bsky.social

New paper! 🥳 When reading a sentence, do you rely on probabilistic or grammatical relations between words, or both? To find out, we designed an experiment that contrasts these two pressures. 🧵 in Cognition with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social & Antje S. Meyer www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.comMore than words: Effects of grammaticality and lexical surprisal in self-paced readingLanguage comprehension requires the integration of information from a wide variety of sources, including sensory input and memory. The present study c…

Lars Meyer reposted

Jordi Martorell
@jordimartorell.bsky.social

New preprint! 🧠 We show that neural synchronization to abstract linguistic structures is independent from acoustic processing, even with stimuli mirroring natural speech! w/ the dream team @diliberg.bsky.social @nicolaml.bsky.social @languagecycles.bsky.social 🔗 doi.org/10.64898/202...

doi.orgBridging the neural synchronization to linguistic structures and natural speech comprehensionSpeech comprehension involves the inference of abstract information from continuous acoustic signals. Prior work suggests that electrophysiological activity is synchronized with abstract linguistic structures (phrases and sentences) during the processing of isochronous syllable sequences. It is yet unclear whether this prior evidence generalizes to natural speech comprehension, which requires the flexible processing of continuous speech, where syllables and other types of linguistic units are anisochronous. Our magnetoencephalography experiment investigated neural synchronization to acoustic (syllables) and abstract units (phrases and sentences) using continuous speech ranging from artificial isochronous to more natural anisochronous. We find that neural synchronization to phrases and sentences, but not syllables, is resilient to naturalistic anisochrony. This suggests that linguistic structure processing reflects endogenous inferences that are fundamentally distinct from the exogenous processing of syllables driven by speech acoustics. Lateralization and linear regression results extend this functional dissociation as hemispheric asymmetry: stimulus-independent leftward lateralization for linguistic structure processing but stimulus-driven rightward lateralization (or bilaterality) for both syllable and acoustic processing. Our findings provide a more realistic characterization of the flexible neural mechanisms supporting the efficient comprehension of natural speech. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Lars Meyer reposted

Adele Goldberg
@adelegoldberg.bsky.social

another great paper from @mh-christiansen.bsky.social, showing that non-constituents* can be primed It's more evidence that traditional linguists were mistaken to believe memory was in short supply: Human memory is compressed, clustered, implicit and vast

Matt Bury, MA Online & Distance Ed & AppLing 🇪🇸@matbury.bsky.social

@adelegoldberg.bsky.social Have you seen this? Nielsen, Y. A., & Christiansen, M. H. (2026). Evidence for the representation of non-hierarchical structures in language. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–10. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

doi.orgEvidence for the representation of non-hierarchical structures in language - Nature Human BehaviourLanguage is often thought to be represented through hierarchically structured units. Nielsen and Christiansen find that non-hierarchical structures are present across reaction-time tasks, eye-tracked ...
Lars Meyer
@languagecycles.bsky.social

We are humbled!!! Thank you, Xinchi Yu!!!

Xinchi Yu@xinchiyu.bsky.social

It was such a privilege to introduce recent cool work from Lena Henke and Lars Meyer (@languagecycles.bsky.social) on time windows and language processing in a "Journal Club" piece on Nature Reviews Psychology @natrevpsychol.nature.com! View-only link: rdcu.be/e1xaY

rdcu.beA language processing time window of around three secondsNature Reviews Psychology - A language processing time window of around three seconds
Lars Meyer
@languagecycles.bsky.social

Go work with Benedikt, his research is legit!

Benedikt Zoefel@benediktzoefel.bsky.social

If you're looking for a PhD and you're interested in the cerebellum, predictions, language, and MEG, please apply by 1st March! We have two open positions. More details here: benediktzoefel.wixsite.com/home/phd

Lars Meyer reposted

Valentina Borghesani
@vborghesani.bsky.social

If I could do a second PhD, this would be it. Join John!

John Mansfield@johnbasil.bsky.social

I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the...

evolvinglanguage.chStudying the Evolution of Abstract Thought - NCCR Evolving LanguageIn the new ERC-funded project, “Conceptual Diversity and the Evolution of Abstract Thought” (CONCEVO), Mansfield will lead a team of researchers to develop a method for reconstructing the evolution of...

Lars Meyer reposted

Alexander Huth
@alexanderhuth.bsky.social

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Eiko Fried@eikofried.bsky.social

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.comBOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex - Nature NeuroscienceUsing quantitative brain imaging, the authors show opposite fMRI BOLD signal to metabolic activity due to variable oxygen extraction across the human cortex. This questions the canonical interpretatio...

Lars Meyer reposted

Mick Bonner
@mickbonner.bsky.social

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

JHU Cognitive Science@jhucogsci.bsky.social

We are seeking candidates for two tenured/tenure-track faculty positions: One in high-level vision, written language and/or conceptual representation apply.interfolio.com/178825 One in language apply.interfolio.com/178813 Please help us spread the word!

apply.interfolio.com Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

Lars Meyer reposted

JsonGeller
@jgeller1phd.bsky.social

Very cool stuff! I am very much enjoying the Neon trackers and its wonderful they show overlap with stationary trackers.

Björn Herrmann@bjherrmann.bsky.social

New work from the lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Mobile eye-tracking glasses assess listening effort through pupil size and eye movements as good as a stationary eye tracker. But mobile glasses also show that people reduce their head movements when listening becomes more effortful.

biorxiv.orgMobile Eye-Tracking Glasses Capture Ocular and Head Markers of Listening EffortTo extend the assessment of listening effort beyond a sound booth, we validated mobile eye-tracking glasses (Pupil Labs Neon) by comparing them to a stationary system (Eyelink DUO) in a controlled env...

Lars Meyer reposted

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
@mpicbs.bsky.social

Lars Meyer receives #ERC Consolidator Grant from @erc.europa.eu 🥳 For his project "Language in Balance: an Imprint of Brain Electrophysiology? (BALANG)”, Lars Meyer @languagecycles.bsky.social receives funding of up to 2 million euros over the next 5 years. Huge congratulations! tinyurl.com/4a5y78nz

cbs.mpg.deLars Meyer receives ERC Consolidator Grant from the EULars Meyer receives ERC Consolidator Grant from the EU

Lars Meyer reposted

Kristof Strijkers
@strijkers.bsky.social

New paper together with Elin Runnqvist and Friedemann Pulvermüller (accepted right before his passing 😔). Must be the first time I am sad to announce a publication, though I am glad Friedemann still got to see this cool collaborative work published. A short 🧵 /1 academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

academic.oup.comShared phonological networks in frontal and temporal cortex for language production and comprehensionAbstract. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated whether language production and understanding recruit similar phoneme-specif

Lars Meyer reposted

Laura Gwilliams
@lauragwilliams.bsky.social

happy to share our new paper, out now in Neuron! led by the incredible Yizhen Zhang, we explore how the brain segments continuous speech into word-forms and uses adaptive dynamics to code for relative time - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.comHuman cortical dynamics of auditory word form encodingWe perceive continuous speech as a series of discrete words, despite the lack of clear acoustic boundaries. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) encodes …

Lars Meyer reposted

Torge Dellert
@torgedellert.bsky.social

👂🧠NCC in an auditory no-report fMRI study 🧠👂 now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social ! www.cell.com/current-biol... Using inattentional deafness, we show that awareness of task-irrelevant sounds mainly activates stimulus-specific sensory brain areas.

cell.comNeural correlates of consciousness in an auditory no-report fMRI studyDellert et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging and inattentional deafness to identify the neural basis of conscious auditory perception in humans. Their results reveal a dominant role of sti...