Moshe Poliak

PhD student, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Publications

Papers, preprints, and conference presentations. Google Scholar keeps the most current list.

* co-first authors · † co-senior authors · ‡ undergraduate mentee

Journal articles

  1. Ozernov-Palchik, O., O’Brien, A. M., Lee, E. J., Richardson, H., Romeo, R., Poliak, M., … Fedorenko, E. (2026). Precision fMRI reveals that the language network exhibits adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization by 4 years of age. Nature Communications, 17, 6505. Preprint
  2. Casto, C., Poliak, M., Tuckute, G., Small, H., Sherlock, P., Wolna, A., … Fedorenko, E. (2026). The cerebellar components of the human language network. Neuron, 114(8), 1504–1523.e11. PDF
  3. Poliak, M., Malik-Moraleda, S., & Gibson, E. (2026). Rational language comprehension depends on priors about both meaning and structure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 52(2), 307–322. DOI
  4. Poliak, M., Chen, C., & Gibson, E. (2025). Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures. Cognition, 265, 106265. DOI
  5. Floyd, S.*, Jouravlev, O.*, Poliak, M., Mineroff, Z., Gibson, E., & Fedorenko, E. (2025). Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge–based causal reasoning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(50), e2424400122. DOI
  6. Clark, T. H., Poliak, M., Regev, T., Haskins, A. J., Robertson, C., & Gibson, E. (2025). The relationship between surprisal and prosodic prominence in conversation reflects intelligibility-oriented pressures. Cognitive Science, 49(10), e70134. DOI
  7. Chen, A. M.*, Hofer, M.*, Poliak, M., Levy, R., & Zaslavsky, N. (2025). Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal–meaning space. Journal of Language Evolution, 10(1), lzaf003. Article
  8. Poliak, M., Ryskin, R., Braginsky, M., & Gibson, E. (2024). It is not what you say but how you say it: Evidence from Russian shows robust effects of the structural prior on noisy channel inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50(4), 637–649.

Under review and in preparation

  1. Poliak, M., & Gibson, E. (under review). Bridge effects are not bridge verbs and bridge verbs are just frequent verbs: A response to Huang et al. (2025). Language. Preprint
  2. de Ávila Othero, G., Poliak, M., Abeillé, A., Hemforth, B., & Gibson, E. (under review). The discourse basis for long-distance dependencies in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Cognition. Preprint
  3. Fang, C. X., Khosla, M., Poliak, M., & Kanwisher, N. G. (under review). Apparent food selectivity reflects multiple non-food image properties. Preprint
  4. Ryskin, R.*, Poliak, M.*, Qian, P., Clark, T. H., Chen, S., Gibson, E.†, & Levy, R.† (in preparation). An integrated account of language comprehension and processing as noisy-channel inference.

Edited volume

  1. Gibson, E., & Poliak, M. (Eds.). (2024). From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax 15). Language Science Press. Open access

Conference presentations

  1. Poliak, M., Ricciardi, G., & Gibson, E. (2026). Information structure drives construction selection: A quantitative investigation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48. Also presented at HSP 2026.
  2. Poliak, M.*, An, A.*, Levy, R., & Gibson, E. (2025). Rational inference underlies judgments of grammatical well-formedness. Poster, Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS).
  3. Ricciardi, G., Poliak, M., & Gibson, E. (2025). The effect of discourse accessibility on syntactic alternations in English. Talk, 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Bordeaux.
  4. Simkova, K. M., Haskins, A. J., Zivsak, B. C., Poliak, M., Clark, T. H., Regev, T. I., Gibson, E., & Robertson, C. E. (2025). Semantic drivers of gaze in individuals with and without autism during dyadic conversation. Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN).
  5. Poliak, M., Kimura, H., & Gibson, E. (2024). Mis-heard lyrics: An ecologically valid test of noisy channel processing. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.
  6. Poliak, M., Malik-Moraleda, S., & Gibson, E. (2024). Sentence processing relies on expectations regarding both meaning and structure. Poster, LSA Annual Meeting.
  7. Poliak, M., Fang, X., Ali, M., Bergen, L., & Gibson, E. (2023). Corrective prosody is semantic, not information theoretic: An online speech production study. Poster, 36th Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP).
  8. Chen, A.*, Hofer, M.*, Poliak, M., Levy, R., & Zaslavsky, N. (2022). The emergence of discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal–meaning space. Poster, 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
  9. Poliak, M., Ryskin, R., Braginsky, M., & Gibson, E. (2022). Effects of the structural prior on noisy-channel inference: Evidence from Russian. Poster, 35th Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP).
  10. Poliak, M., Yacovone, A., & Snedeker, J. (2022). Between you and me: Use ERP decoding when between-participants variation is high. Poster, 35th Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP).
  11. Poliak, M., Morehouse, K., & Banaji, M. (2021). Gender and judgments of fame: Responses to “noise” are sensitive to local, not global, “signal.” Poster, APS Annual Convention.
  12. Yacovone, A., Poliak, M., Koya, H., & Snedeker, J. (2021). ERP decoding shows bilinguals represent the language of a code-switch after lexical processing. Poster, 34th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.