Marten van Schijndel is an Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at Cornell University, affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program and the Department of Linguistics within the College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on incremental language processing, comparing human linguistic behavior with computational models like neural networks. He organizes the Computational Psycholinguistic Discussions (C.Psyd) and collaborates with the Cornell Computational Linguistics Lab (CLab) and Cornell NLP Group. Van Schijndel’s work bridges computational modeling and psycholinguistics, probing how humans and models process language incrementally, particularly through methodologies like fMRI and behavioral experiments. His research interests include computational modeling of language processing, neural network representations, and the interplay between syntax, semantics, and discourse. Notably, he investigates ungrounded learning in neural models, exploring what linguistic aspects emerge from statistical patterns alone. Recent contributions include studies on semantic change quantification, phonotactic effects in context, and discourse predictability in Hindi word order. Van Schijndel teaches courses such as Computational Linguistics II and leads seminars on natural language processing. He actively advises students like John R. Starr, Ashlyn Winship, and Zander Lynch, whose work spans experimental paradigms for semantic spaces, implicit arguments in sentence processing, and semantic role localization. His recent activities include co-organizing workshops on event representation (PEER 2025) and presenting at the University of Rochester on event construction from language. Media highlights include research on tracking anti-immigrant hate speech and semantic evolution in French texts.












