Hi. I’m Jacob. I am a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, working with Roger Levy, in the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. In Summer 2024, I finished my PhD at McGill University in Linguistics, under the supervision of Tim O’Donnell, where I was a member of the Montreal Computational & Quantitative Linguistics Lab and Mila – Quebec AI Institute.

I’m interested in lots of things, but currently I am focusing on psycholinguistic theories of human language processing, using information theory, algorithmic complexity results, and tools from machine learning. I want to understand what human and machine learning can tell us about the underlying structure and complexity of language. Human language is complicated, yet we learn to use is expertly and fluently without trying. …How do we do that? 🤔

I just noticed there’s a typo in the above paragraph. That illustrates another question I am currently interested in: How come typos and more generally production errors/imprecision don’t hinder understanding more than they do?

I’m also a (mostly retired) professional ballet dancer, formerly with Festival Ballet Providence (now Ballet RI) in Rhode Island, The Vanemuine Theatre in Tartu, Estonia, and José Mateo Ballet Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Name update, September 2024:
I will now be using my new surname, Vigly. My old surname is now a middle name (that is, I am “Vigly, Jacob Hoover”).
Previously I published under the surname Hoover.