Yang Tan Collective Alumni Series: Noga Zaslavsky, New York University
Building 46, 43 VASSAR ST, Cambridge, MA
Date: Monday, September 28, 2026 Time: 3:00 – 4:00 pm Location: Building 46, Seminar Room 3189 Talk Title: Meaning in mind: Lossy compression in children, bilinguals, and LLMs Abstract: How do diverse minds organize meaning in language? One theory proposes that lossy data compression characterizes word meanings across languages. While this theory has gained substantial empirical support, the evidence comes primarily from monolingual adults, leaving open the question of whether the same principle also guides other populations operating under different learning and social constraints. In this talk, I focus on three such groups: children, bilingual adults, and our recent artificial interlocutors, LLMs. Specifically, I show that: (1) children are not only language learners, but also efficient communicators, achieving near-optimal compression tradeoffs within their developing cognitive capacity; (2) bilinguals, who navigate non-aligned category systems from two different languages, do so while maintaining converged systems that are as efficiently compressed as those of monolinguals; and (3) LLMs, which are not trained for optimizing lossy compression, nonetheless exhibit an emergent…