Matthew Kogan

Papers

Kogan, M. (2023). Maintaining Syntactic Positions and Thematic Roles in Memory [Master's Thesis]. University of California, Santa Cruz.

Presentations

Syntactic Representations and Interference in Memory

Syntactic positional similarity modulates interference for thematic and agreement dependencies.
Long Talk at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 39, MIT. March 2026. (with Aditi Borra, Ruoqing Yao, and Matt Wagers)

Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure.
Poster at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP), UC Davis. November 2025 (with co-first author Ruoqing Yao, and Matt Wagers)

Modeling interference with distributed representations of lexical, morphological, and positional information.
Short Talk the Bay Area Language Processing Interest Group (BAyLI), UCSC. October 2025. (with co-first author Ruoqing Yao)

Probing facilitatory and inhibitory interference with English ditransitives.
Poster at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 37, University of Michigan. May 2024. (with Matt Wagers)

Investigating syntactic gating during subject retrieval with English ditransitives.
Talk at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP) 6, Stanford. January 2024. (with Matt Wagers)

Maintaining syntactic positions and thematic roles in memory: Evidence from ditransitive alternations in English.
Poster at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP) 29, BCBL. September 2023. (with Matt Wagers)

The Role of Specifiers in a Content-Addressable Retrieval Mechanism.
Talk at the Linguistics Spring Research Symposium, UCSC. April 2023.

Experimental Syntax of (Subject) Islands

Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: cross-constructional evidence.
Poster at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 38, University of Maryland. March 2025. (with Mandy Cartner, Niko Webster, Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel)

Information structure alone cannot account for subject islandhood: an experimental study.
Talk at Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) 47, Goethe University. March 2025. (with Niko Webster*, Mandy Cartner, Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel; * = first author)

“I am a rock, I am an island”: Subject islands are not reducible to discourse function
Talk at Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC), UCSC. March 2025. (with Niko Webster*, Mandy Cartner, Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel; * = co-first-author)

Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: evidence from Topicalization.
Poster at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP) 30. Edinburgh, Scotland. September 2025. (with Mandy Cartner, Niko Webster, Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel)

Deploying Animacy in Parsing and Comprehension

Canonical Argument Alignment Modulates Gap, but not RP, Acceptability in English.
Poster at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 37, University of Michigan. May 2024. (with Mandy Cartner, Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers)

The Subject-Object Asymmetry in Embedded Questions: Evidence from the Maze.
Talk at California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP) 5, UCLA. January 2023. (with Matt Wagers)

”It’s alive!”: Animacy-based structural expectations rapidly update with context.
Poster at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 35, UCSC. (with Stephanie Rich*, Lalitha Balachandran, Jack Duff, Nicholas Van Handel, Maya Wax Cavallaro, and Matt Wagers; * = first author)