Linguist
Hello! I’m Jiayi Lu (陆家屹，he/his), and I’m a linguist. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University. Before Northwestern, I was a postdoctoral fellow from 2024-2025 at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Julie Anne Legate and Charles Yang. I received my PhD in linguistics from Stanford in 2024, and my BA in linguistics and neuroscience from Northwestern University in 2019. I’m originally from Beijing, China.
I’m a psycholinguist and a syntactician.
The central question of my recent and ongoing research is how linguistic input leads to changes in a speaker’s knowledge and behavior (through acquisition or in-the-moment adaptation). In my dissertation, I examined the underlying mechanism of the syntactic satiation effect: the effect whereby repeated exposure to degraded sentences increases speakers’ acceptability ratings for such sentences. Other related research outputs include Lu, Villata, and Sprouse (in prep), Lu, Merchan, Wang, and Degen (2024), Lu, Frank, and Degen (2024), Lu, Wright, and Degen (2022), and Lu, Lassiter and Degen (2021).
In my recent work, I am examining how speakers of different languages came to acquire different syntactic knowledge from input, and how the systematic syntactic variation can be explained by a combination of the architecture of grammar, the systematic variability in the input data children are exposed to, and a learning mechanism that allows generalization from observed structures to unobserved ones. Example works include Lu, Legate, and Yang (2025, in prep), and Lu, Papineau, Jeong, Hernandez, Goodwin, and Anttila (2025).
In sum, my recent and ongoing work combines my interests in both psycholinguistics and syntax: it answers key syntactic questions about how movement and locality constraints are encoded in our linguistic knowledge, while also informing how such representations are shaped by variable linguistic input during language acquisition and in-the-moment linguistic adaptation.
In addition to the lines of work described above, I have also done research on the syntactic and information structural accounts of island effects (Lu, Thompson, and Yoshida 2020; Kim, Li, and Lu 2023; Lu, Pan, and Degen, to appear), the coordination structure (Lu 2021; Lu and Kim 2022; Kim and Lu 2024), and theories of sentence processing (Lu, Walenski, and Thompson 2018; Kim and Lu 2021; Kim and Lu 2022; Zhan, Chen, Levy, Lu, and Gibson 2023).
Please see below for a comprehensive list of my research outputs.
Lu, J.^, Pan, D.^, & Degen, J. (to appear) Discourse Effects on the Manner-of-Speaking Island. Language.
Lu, J.^, Merchan, J.^, Wang, L.^, & Degen, J. (2024) Can Syntactic Log-Odds Ratio Predict Acceptability and Satiation?. Society for Computation in Linguistics 7(1): 10–19
Lu, J., Frank, M. C., & Degen, J. (2024) A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Satiation in Extraction from Islands. Glossa Psycholinguistics 3(1): X, pp. 1–33.
Kim, N. & Lu, J. (2024) Coordination of Unlike Categories Creates Grammaticality Illusion. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 24(1): 52-61
Zhan, M., Chen, S., Levy, R., Lu, J., & Gibson, E. (2023). Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Cognitive Science 47(12): e13383.
Kim, N., Li, Z., & Lu, J. (2023). Island-Sensitivity of Two Different Interpretations of Why in Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology 13:1059823.
Lu, J., Wright, N., & Degen, J. (2022). Satiation effects generalize across island types. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44).
Lu, J. & Kim, N. (2022). The Puzzle of Argument Structure Mismatch in Gapping. Frontiers in Psychology 13:907823.
Kim, N., & Lu, J. (2022). Predictive Sentence Processing: Evidence from Passive Relative Clause Processing. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 22(1):70-85
Kim, N., & Lu, J. (2021). An Illusion of Grammaticality in Wh-Questions. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 699-716.
Lu, J., Lassiter, D., & Degen, J. (2021). Syntactic satiation is driven by speaker-specific adaptation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43), 1493-1499.
Lu, J., Thompson, C.K., & Yoshida, M. (2020). Chinese Wh-in-Situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study. Linguistic Inquiry, 51(3), 611-623.
^: Equal contributions
Lu, J. (under review). An Adjunction Analysis of Clause Chaining in Turkish.
An Adjunction Analysis of Clause Chaining in Turkish. 2nd Qualifying Paper, Stanford University. Advised by Boris Harizanov, Vera Gribanova, Daniel Lassiter.
Satiation as Rapid Syntactic Adaptation. 1st Qualifying Paper, Stanford University. Advised by Judith Degen, Boris Harizanov, Daniel Lassiter.
Who Wrote a Thesis that is on What: Wh-in-situ and Islands. BA Thesis, Northwestern University. Adivsed by Masaya Yoshida, Shayne Sloggett.
^: Equal contributions
Lu, J., Legate, J.A., and Yang, C. (2025). Examining the bridge/non-bridge distinction in Mandarin Chinese. Poster to be presented at the 2025 Society of Human Sentence Processing (HSP) conference, College Park, MD.
Lu, J., Papineau, B., Jeong, S., Hernandez, A., Goodwin, E., and Anttila, A. (2025). Interspeaker Variation in Copular Agreement with Disjoined Subjects: an Optimality-Theoretic Account. Talk presented at the 2025 Linguistics Society of America (LSA) annual conference, Philadelphia, PA.
Lu, J., Merchan, J., Wang, L., & Degen, J. (2024) Can syntactic Log-odds ratio predict acceptability and satiation?. Poster presented at SCiL 2024. Irvine, CA.
Merchan, J., Wang, L., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2024). Can language model surprisal predict acceptability and satiation?. Poster presented at CAMP 2024. Stanford, CA.
Yao, R., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2024). Perceived interpretability predicts satiability for Complex-NP island but not Whether-island. Talk presented at CAMP 2024. Stanford, CA.
Lu, J., Pan, D., and Degen, J. (2024). Evidence for a discourse account of Manner-of-Speaking islands. Talk presented at LSA 2024. New York, NY.
Pan, D., Lu, J., & Degen, J. (2023). Discourse Foregrounding Ameliorates Manner-of-Speaking Islands. Poster presented at HSP 2023. Pittsburgh, PA.
Lu, J., & Degen, J. (2023). Which islands satiate? A meta-analysis. Talk presented at CAMP 2023. Los Angeles, CA.
Pan, D., Lu, J., & Degen, J. (2023). Can Manner-of-Speaking Islands be Rescued Through Discourse Foregrounding. Short talk to be presented at CAMP 2023. Los Angeles, CA.
Lu, J., & Kim, N. (2023). Coordination of Unlike Categories Creates Grammaticality Illusion. Poster presented at LSA 2023. Denver, CO.
Lu, J., & Degen, J. (2023). Which island-violating sentences satiate: A meta-analysis. Poster presented at LSA 2023. Denver, CO.
Lu, J., Wright, N., & Degen, J. (2022). Satiation effects generalize across island types. Poster presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, Canada.
Wright, N., Lu, J., & Degen, J. (2022). What is the representational target of island satiation effects?. Poster presented at HSP 2022. Online.
Kim, N., & Lu, J. (2022). Maximizing parallelism in gapping: the case of argument structure mismatches. Poster presented at LSA 2022. Washington, D.C.
Lu, J., Lassiter, D., & Degen, J. (2021). Syntactic satiation is driven by speaker-specific adaptation. Short talk presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Online.
Lu, J. (2021). Reducing conjunct islands to adjunct islands: Evidence from Turkish. Talk presented at LSA 2021. Online.
Lu, J., & Degen, J. (2021). Satiation as Rapid Adaptation to Ungrammatical Constructions. Talk presented at LSA 2021. Online.
Lu, J., Thompson, C.K., & Yoshida, M. (2018). Examining Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry of Island Effect in Mandarin Chinese. Poster presented at LSA 2019. New York City, New York.
Lu, J., Thompson, C.K., & Yoshida, M. (2018). Chinese Wh-in-Situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study. Poster presented at AMLaP 2018. Berlin, Germany.
Lu, J., Walenski, W., & Thompson, C.K. EEG evidence for different syntactic expectations in parsing Chinese subject- and object-relative clauses. Poster presented at SNL 2018. Quebec City, Canada.
In my free time, I enjoy cooking, traveling, and watching movies. I’m also a collector of stamps, covers, and other ephemera. As a member of the American First Day Cover Society, I also create cachets (artworks on the left side of stamped covers) for first-day covers. I also love sending and receiving postcards: here is a website that I use to exchange postcards with my fellow postal enthusiasts around the globe.
I love playing and watching soccer. I am a licensed youth soccer coach (USSF E license), and I once coached the U13/14 girls team at Jahbat FC (a travel team based in Evanston, IL.) for two seasons from 2016 to 2017. Here is a picture of me with the team! Nowadays, I play in the local recreational league in the Bay Area as a goalie.
My Erdős number is 5: Paul Erdős -> Noga Alon -> Thomas L. Griffiths -> Noah D. Goodman -> Dan Lassiter -> me.
jiayi(dot)lu(at)northwestern(dot)edu
