Richard Futrell, UC Irvine language science associate professor, has received a $22,200 grant from the University of California Office of the President to support a three-pronged study on theoretic models of language comprehension and production.

The first project involves development of new large language models that can predict EEG and reading time courses across diverse languages. Another is focused on developing models to explain how people build accurate sentences under various cognitive constraints. And the third is investigating the influence of predictability on working memory in sentence processing across multiple languages.

Findings, developed in collaboration with graduate student researchers, will be presented in an online lecture series on linguistic structure and shared in a developing book, Language: An Information Theoretic Introduction.

“This work aims to integrate LLMs as estimators of human expectations in language processing, replacing traditional methods such as n-gram modeling,” he says. “This integration helps clarify the role of predictive models like LLMs in natural language processing and highlights differences between human linguistic processing and LLM predictions.”

Futrell joined the UC Irvine faculty in 2018 following a postdoctoral researcher post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His work, which examines how variation among languages is explained by efficient communication, has been featured in academic publications including Cognition, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, the Journal of Memory and Language, and others. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as multiple fellowships and scholarships supporting his language studies. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive sciences at MIT, and his M.A. and B.A. in linguistics at Stanford University. He spent one year in the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and was an intern on the Siri Advanced Development Group for Apple, Inc. 

His current UCOP-funded study runs from January 2025-December 2026.