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, where I direct the Syntax and Experimental Linguistics (SEAL) Lab. 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, neuroscience, and integrated science 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 work on syntactic adaptation and satiation 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). More recently, I am collaborating with my colleague Eszter Ronai to examine the phenomenon of scalar implicature adaptation, and its underlying mechanism.
In my recent work, I have also examined 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 (2026), 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, 2025; Lu and Kim, in press), 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., and Kim, N. (accepted). Adjunct Island Effect on Wh-Scrambling in Korean. Glossa
Lu, J., Legate, J.A., and Yang, C. (accepted). The Learnability of Bridge Effects. Journal of Linguistics.
Lu, J.^, Pan, D.^, and Degen, J. (2025) Discourse Effects on the Manner-of-Speaking Island. Language 101(4): 627-659
Lu, J.^, Merchan, J.^, Wang, L.^, and 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., and Degen, J. (2024) A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Satiation in Extraction from Islands. Glossa Psycholinguistics 3(1): X, pp. 1–33.
Kim, N. and 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., and Gibson, E. (2023). Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Cognitive Science 47(12): e13383.
Kim, N., Li, Z., and Lu, J. (2023). Island-Sensitivity of Two Different Interpretations of Why in Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology 13:1059823.
Lu, J., Wright, N., and Degen, J. (2022). Satiation effects generalize across island types. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44).
Lu, J. and Kim, N. (2022). The Puzzle of Argument Structure Mismatch in Gapping. Frontiers in Psychology 13:907823.
Kim, N., and 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., and Lu, J. (2021). An Illusion of Grammaticality in Wh-Questions. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 699-716.
Lu, J., Lassiter, D., and 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., and Yoshida, M. (2020). Chinese Wh-in-Situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study. Linguistic Inquiry, 51(3), 611-623.
^: Equal contributions
Yang, X., and Lu, J. (under review). Islands Satiate without Change in Backgroundedness.
Lu, J., Villata, S., and Sprouse, J. (in prep) Probing the satiation of island effects.
Papineau, B., Lu, J., Jeong, S., Goodwin, E., and Anttila, A. (in prep). Copular Agreement with Disjoined Subjects in English
Lu, J., Yang, X., and Kim, N. (in prep) Reading time signature of the that-trace effect satiation: Evidence for an adaptation account.
An Adjunction Analysis of Clause Chaining in Turkish. 2nd Qualifying Paper, Stanford University.
Satiation as Rapid Syntactic Adaptation. 1st Qualifying Paper, Stanford University.
Who Wrote a Thesis that is on What: Wh-in-situ and Islands. BA Thesis, Northwestern University.
Ronai, E., Lu, J., Wang, A., and Feng, J. (2026). Evidence for adaptation in scalar implicature calculation. ELM 2026, Philadelphia, PA.
Yang, X., Lu, J., (2026). Island satiates without change in backgroundedness. HSP 2026, Cambridge, MA.
Lu, J., (2026). Availability of acceptable alternatives modulates satiation. LSA 2026, New Orleans, LA.
Lu, J., Legate, J.A., and Yang, C. (2025). Examining the bridge/non-bridge distinction in Mandarin Chinese. HSP 2025, 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. LSA 2025, Philadelphia, PA.
Lu, J., Merchan, J., Wang, L., \& Degen, J. (2024) Can syntactic Log-odds ratio predict acceptability and satiation?. SCiL 2024. Irvine, CA.
Merchan, J., Wang, L., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2024). Can language model surprisal predict acceptability and satiation?. CAMP 2024. Stanford, CA.
Yao, R., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2024). Perceived interpretability predicts satiability for Complex-NP island but not Whether-island. CAMP 2024. Stanford, CA.
Lu, J., Pan, D., and Degen, J. (2024). Evidence for a discourse account of Manner-of-Speaking islands. LSA 2024. New York, NY.
Pan, D., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2023). Discourse Foregrounding Ameliorates Manner-of-Speaking Islands. HSP 2023. Pittsburgh, PA.
Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2023). Which islands satiate? A meta-analysis. CAMP 2023. Los Angeles, CA.
Pan, D., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2023). Can Manner-of-Speaking Islands be Rescued Through Discourse Foregrounding. CAMP 2023. Los Angeles, CA.
Lu, J., and Kim, N. (2023). Coordination of Unlike Categories Creates Grammaticality Illusion. LSA 2023. Denver, CO.
Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2023). Which island-violating sentences satiate: A meta-analysis. LSA 2023. Denver, CO.
Lu, J., Wright, N., and Degen, J. (2022). Satiation effects generalize across island types. The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, Canada.
Wright, N., Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2022). What is the representational target of island satiation effects?. HSP 2022. Online.
Kim, N., and Lu, J. (2022). Maximizing parallelism in gapping: the case of argument structure mismatches. LSA 2022. Washington, D.C.
Lu, J., Lassiter, D., and Degen, J. (2021). Syntactic satiation is driven by speaker-specific adaptation. The 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Online.
Lu, J. (2021). Reducing conjunct islands to adjunct islands: Evidence from Turkish. LSA 2021. Online.
Lu, J., and Degen, J. (2021). Satiation as Rapid Adaptation to Ungrammatical Constructions. LSA 2021. Online.
Lu, J., Thompson, C.K., and Yoshida, M. (2018). Examining Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry of Island Effect in Mandarin Chinese. LSA 2019. New York City, New York.
Lu, J., Thompson, C.K., and Yoshida, M. (2018). Chinese Wh-in-Situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study. AMLaP 2018. Berlin, Germany.
Lu, J., Walenski, W., and Thompson, C.K. EEG evidence for different syntactic expectations in parsing Chinese subject- and object-relative clauses. 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. 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.
My Erdős number is 5: Paul Erdős -> Noga Alon -> Thomas L. Griffiths -> Noah D. Goodman -> Dan Lassiter -> me.
jiayi.lu@northwestern.edu