Moshe Poliak

I am a PhD student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. My advisor is Ted Gibson, which means that I am a very lucky person. I study psycholinguistics, or what processes in the mind are involved in language production and comprehension. Using the noisy channel framework, I apply one of the most fundamental questions in psychology to language: how do my expectation about the world shape how I make sense of it? Why do we hear what we expect to hear? I am also interested in prosody: how it relates to information theory, how it changes (or not) cross linguistically, and, aspirationally, I also want to study how we compensate for the absence of prosody in writing.

Teaching and mentoring are very close to my heart. These days I am a teaching assistant at MIT 9.59: Lab in Psycholinguistics. I love seeing students develop coding and statistics skills because, when I started college, I was set on avoiding CS and stats completely. But thanks to an amazing mentor, I overcame my fears and acquired computational skills, which turned out to be one of the best things to have happened to me in college (so if you are reading this but you have no idea how/why to STEM, reach out :) ).

In the past, as an undergrad at Harvard, I have worked with Anthony Yacovone and Jesse Snedeker on language development and applying neural decoding to analysis of ERP data. I have also worked with Mahzarin Banaji for several years on implicit gender-fame stereotyping and implicit attitude acquisition, and our relationship has been lifechanging for me.

Current Interests

• Rational Comprehension (e.g., Noisy Channel Processing)
• Prosody
• Statistical methods

When I am not doing research I am…

• watching old movies and/or foreign movies.
• learning figure skating as an adult.
• learning languages.
• singing (heavy metal or classical).
• enjoying a glass of wine or a wee dram.