Linguist
Hello! I’m Jiayi Lu (陆家屹，he/his), and I’m a linguist. I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Dr. Julie Anne Legate. I received my PhD in linguistics from Stanford in 2024. I’m originally from Beijing, China.
I am primarily interested in psycholinguistics and syntax.
In the domain of psycholinguistics, I’m interested in studying the linguistic adaptation effect (how do language users track and adapt to the variability in other people’s grammars and their different ways of using languages?), and the nature of acceptability judgments (what do people do when they give acceptability ratings to sentences? What makes a sentence (un)acceptable? When do acceptability ratings change and why?). I have also done some work on the noisy-channel model of sentence comprehension, and the processing of relative clauses. My dissertation is on syntactic satiation.
In the domain of syntax, I’m generally interested in island effects. Specifically, I have looked at the argument/adjunct asymmetry in island effects, and the islandhood of conjuncts. I am also interested in the structure of clause chaining and coordination.
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.^, Pan, D.^, & Degen, J. (under review) Discourse Effects on the Manner-of-Speaking Island.
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., 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 to be 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.
jiayilu(at)sas(dot)upenn(dot)edu
