About

Edward L. Gibson is Associate Dean for Faculty at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a Professor in the Department of Political Science. He served as Chair of the department from 2013 to 2015. His current research focuses on democratization in Latin America and the United States, with additional work on the politics of federalism, party politics, conservative parties, and market reform in Latin America. Gibson has published three books, including his most recent work, Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2013). This book addresses enduring questions about democratic regimes, specifically how authoritarian states and provinces can prosper within national democracies and how they can occasionally be dismantled. It compares the American "Solid South" in the 19th and 20th centuries with contemporary cases in Latin America. Boundary Control received several awards, including the V.O. Key Prize for Best Book on U.S. Southern Politics from the Southern Political Science Association, the Donna Lee Van Cott Prize for Best Book on Latin American Political Institutions from the Latin American Studies Association, and was a runner-up for the American Political Science Association’s Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics. His earlier books include Federalism and Democracy in Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (Johns Hopkins, 1996). Gibson has also published articles in leading journals such as World Politics, Comparative Politics, and Studies in Comparative International Development. He was the first political scientist to receive a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation and has received research support from the Howard Foundation, the Searle Kinship Foundation, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. In addition to his research accomplishments, Gibson has earned numerous teaching awards, including Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the university’s highest teaching recognition. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Research topics

• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Pedagogy
• Gerontology
• Endocrinology
• Demography
• Pediatrics
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• The Relationship Between Surprisal and Prosodic Prominence in Conversation Reflects Intelligibility‐Oriented Pressures

  Cognitive Science · 2025-10-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Conversation is a dynamic, multimodal activity involving the exchange of complex streams of information like words, prosody, gesture, eye contact, and backchannels. Understanding how these different channels interact in naturalistic scenarios is essential for understanding the mechanisms governing human communication. Past studies suggested that the duration of words is tied to their predictability in context, but it remains unclear whether this relationship is speaker-oriented (e.g., retrieval or production-based) or due to listener-oriented, intelligibility-based pressures (i.e., emphasizing unpredictable words to ease comprehension). This study aims to examine the relationship between predictability and additional acoustic variables, to test how much intelligibility-oriented principles impact conversation. We use the GPT-2 large language model to assess the relationship between surprisal, a measure of unpredictability, and several variables known to play an important role in conversation-the prosodic features of duration, intensity, and pitch. We perform this analysis on the CANDOR corpus of naturalistic spoken video call conversation between strangers in English. In keeping with previous results using n-gram predictability, we find that GPT-2 surprisal predicts significantly higher values for duration. Moreover, surprisal also predicts maximum pitch and pitch range even when controlling for duration, with mixed evidence for an effect of surprisal on intensity. Additionally, we investigated listener backchannels (short interjections like "yeah" or "mhm") and found that listener backchannels tended to be accompanied and followed by a spike in the surprisal of speakers' words. Finally, we demonstrate a divergence between the effect of context window size on the model fit of surprisal to maximum pitch and to other variables. The results provide additional support for intelligibility-based accounts, which hold that language production is sensitive to a pressure for successful communication, not just speaker-oriented pressures. Our data and analysis code are shared: https://osf.io/sqpn6/?view_only=e4d9e36c68b54863bc781e359463e1fe.

  PublisherDOI

• Syntactic Complexity Phenomena Are Better Explained Without Empty Elements Mediating Long‐Distance Dependencies

  Cognitive Science · 2025-08-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We report the results of two acceptability judgment experiments on English materials, which were designed in order to help disentangle predictions of syntactic theories with transformations from nontransformational theories. The materials in these experiments were motivated from examples from Pickering & Barry (1991), who provided intuitive evidence that there is little processing cost for connecting a fronted prepositional phrase to its verb, even if it is the second postverbal argument of a verb in the declarative form. For example, the PP on which connects to the verb put in the sentence This is the saucer on which Mary put the cup into which she poured the milk. If there is a transformation of phrases from declarative structures to interrogative structures (as proposed in Chomsky (1957) and all versions of related theories since), then there is a long-distance connection between the fronted PP and its base position following the NP object, for example, the cup into which she poured the milk, which is not complete until the end of the sentence. In contrast, in a theory without transformations, the PP can be directly associated with its role-assigning verb put when this verb is encountered. If there is cost for processing making dependency connections that is proportional to their distances, then transformational theories predict a large processing cost for this kind of structure, relative to controls. In contrast, nontransformational theories predict no large cost. The results of the two rating experiments consistently supported the predictions of the non-transformational theories relative to those of the transformational theories. We argue that, in line with other current evidence, the nontransformational theories appear to better support the available empirical data.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: social conventions, intonation, and world-knowledge-based causal reasoning

  2025-07-03

  preprintOpen access

  Real-life language comprehension frequently requires non-literal interpretation and inferences about speaker intent. What is the structure of these so-called pragmatic abilities? We applied a dimensionality reduction approach to a large behavioral dataset (776 participants, each completing an 8-hour battery of diverse non-literal comprehension tasks). By examining covariation in performance across tasks, we identified three interpretable components of pragmatic language use: adherence to social conventions, extracting meaning from intonation, and causal reasoning based on world knowledge. Thus, pragmatic language use is relatively low-dimensional cognitively, and its distinct components may a) draw on dissociable neural substrates, b) exhibit distinct developmental trajectories and differential susceptibility to genetic brain disorders, and c) be variably challenging for artificial intelligence systems.

  PublisherDOI

• The relationship between surprisal, prosody, and backchannels in conversation reflects intelligibility-oriented pressures

  2025-01-23 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Conversation is a dynamic, multi-modal activity involving the exchange of complex streams of information like words, prosody, gesture, eye contact, and backchannels. Understanding how these different channels interact in naturalistic scenarios is essential for understanding the mechanisms governing human communication.Past studies suggested that the duration of words is tied to their predictability in context, but it remains unclear whether this relationship is speaker-oriented (e.g. retrieval or production-based) or due to listener-oriented, intelligibility-based pressures (i.e. emphasizing unpredictable words to ease comprehension).This study aims to examine the relationship between predictability and additional streams of speaker and listener behavior, to test how much intelligibility-oriented principles impact conversation.We use the GPT-2 large language model to assess the relationship between surprisal, a measure of unpredictability, and several variables known to play an important role in conversation --- the prosodic features of duration, pitch, and intensity, and the timing of listener backchannels. We perform this analysis on the CANDOR corpus of naturalistic spoken video call conversation between strangers in English.In keeping with previous results using n-gram predictability, we find that GPT-2 surprisal predicts significantly higher values for duration. Moreover, surprisal also predicts maximum pitch and maximum intensity even when controlling for duration. Additionally, listener backchannels were more likely to overlap high-surprisal words compared to low-surprisal words, suggesting that listeners provide verbal feedback and acknowledgement of unpredictable, i.e. informative, words.The results provide additional support for intelligibility-based accounts, which hold that language production is sensitive to a pressure for successful communication, not just speaker-oriented pressures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Diet and mental health in school-aged children: a mini review of school-based dietary intervention studies

  Frontiers in Education · 2025-09-30 · 1 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  School-based dietary interventions are implemented to improve health outcomes in children and adolescents, yet their impact on mental health and wellbeing remains underexplored. This mini-review synthesized findings from seventeen interventions assessing behavioral functioning and mental health symptoms in children (6–12 years) or adolescents (13–18 years). Most studies were conducted across multiple sites, enabling recruitment of large, diverse populations. More studies were conducted in children compared to adolescents. Behavioral outcomes such as hyperactivity, inattention, and oppositional behavior were commonly assessed in younger children via parent or teacher reports, while adolescent studies more frequently measured mental health symptoms, including depression and anxiety, through self-report. Supplementation, particularly in the context of nutrient deficiencies, was associated with modest improvements in behavioral functioning in children and mental health symptoms in adolescents. However, outcomes varied by the assessor (parent or teacher), and some studies showed placebo effects. In contrast, food reformulation interventions showed no significant impact on mental health outcomes. Despite the use of validated tools, methodological limitations, and variation in participants’ nutritional status limit interpretation. Overall, school-based dietary interventions show potential to improve mental health by reaching large, diverse populations. Further research is needed using standardized, age-appropriate measures and incorporating assessment of nutritional status to understand how diet can support and improve mental health in children and adolescents.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A tripartite structure of pragmatic language abilities: comprehension of social conventions, intonation processing and causal reasoning

  2025-07-03

  preprintOpen access

  Successful communication requires frequent inferences. In a large-scale individual-differences investigation, we searched for dissociable components in the ability to make such inferences, commonly referred to as pragmatic language ability. In Experiment 1, n=376 participants each completed an 8-hour behavioral battery of 18 diverse pragmatic tasks in English. Controlling for IQ, an exploratory factor analysis revealed three clusters, which can be post-hoc interpreted as corresponding to i) understanding social conventions (critical for phenomena like indirect requests and irony), ii) interpreting emotional and contrastive intonation patterns, and iii) making causal inferences based on world knowledge. This tripartite structure largely replicated a) in a new sample of n=400 participants (Experiment 2), which additionally ensured that the intonation cluster is not an artifact of the auditory presentation modality, and b) when applying Bayesian factor analysis to the entire dataset. This research uncovers important structure in the toolkit underlying human communication and can inform our understanding of pragmatic difficulties in individuals with developmental and acquired brain disorders, and pragmatic successes and failures in neural network language models.

  PublisherDOI

• Dietary tryptophan predicts resting state functional connectivity within the emotion regulation network

  Appetite · 2025-07-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Comparative illusions are evidence of rational inference in language comprehension.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2025-07-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  to be acceptable while in fact it is semantically anomalous. We provide a potential explanation for this language illusion from the noisy-channel framework. We hypothesize that comprehenders make rational inferences over the perceived sentence by entertaining alternative "close" plausible interpretations, where closeness is determined by possible production errors. In four experiments, (a) we identified a linguistic construction that elicits a salient CI illusion effect, (b) we established a range of plausible interpretations of the CI sentence, and (c) we found that the probability for comprehenders to assign a certain plausible interpretation to the CI sentence is proportional to how likely they think that interpretation is to be produced as the CI sentence during noisy language communication. This work contributes to a growing body of literature supporting rational noisy-channel inference during language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Rational language comprehension depends on priors about both meaning and structure.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · 2025-04-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  s = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical word order (subject-object-verb in Hindi, subject-verb-object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object-subject-verb in Hindi, object-verb-subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• The relationship between surprisal, prosody, and backchannels in conversation reflects intelligibility-oriented pressures

  2025-01-23

  preprintOpen access

  Conversation is a dynamic, multi-modal activity involving the exchange of complex streams of information like words, prosody, gesture, eye contact, and backchannels. Understanding how these different channels interact in naturalistic scenarios is essential for understanding the mechanisms governing human communication.Past studies suggested that the duration of words is tied to their predictability in context, but it remains unclear whether this relationship is speaker-oriented (e.g. retrieval or production-based) or due to listener-oriented, intelligibility-based pressures (i.e. emphasizing unpredictable words to ease comprehension).This study aims to examine the relationship between predictability and additional streams of speaker and listener behavior, to test how much intelligibility-oriented principles impact conversation.We use the GPT-2 large language model to assess the relationship between surprisal, a measure of unpredictability, and several variables known to play an important role in conversation --- the prosodic features of duration, pitch, and intensity, and the timing of listener backchannels. We perform this analysis on the CANDOR corpus of naturalistic spoken video call conversation between strangers in English.In keeping with previous results using n-gram predictability, we find that GPT-2 surprisal predicts significantly higher values for duration. Moreover, surprisal also predicts maximum pitch and maximum intensity even when controlling for duration. Additionally, listener backchannels were more likely to overlap high-surprisal words compared to low-surprisal words, suggesting that listeners provide verbal feedback and acknowledgement of unpredictable, i.e. informative, words.The results provide additional support for intelligibility-based accounts, which hold that language production is sensitive to a pressure for successful communication, not just speaker-oriented pressures.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Discovering Semantic Primitives

  NSF · $12k · 2010–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Jane Wardle

  31 shared

• G. Curzon

  14 shared

• David Booth

  St. John Hospital & Medical Center

  14 shared

• Lucy Cooke

  13 shared

• Sue Reeves

  University of Roehampton

  12 shared

• Evelina Fedorenko

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  12 shared

• Carolyn Summerbell

  11 shared

• Sammy Floyd

  Sarah Lawrence College

  10 shared

Awards & honors

• V.O. Key Award for the Best Book on U.S. Southern Politics
• Latin American Studies Association's Donna Lee Van Cott Awar…