Dustin A. ChacĂłn

@lingdustin.bsky.social

2464 Followers 1068 Following

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz. {Neuro/psycho}linguistics, syntax, and South Asian languages. He/him đŸłïžâ€đŸŒˆ. Sometimes: Horror movies, video games, cats. www.lingdustin.net

An uncanny photo of a studio with a carpeted kitchen area, two pillars in the middle of the studio, and strangely textured floor. The ceilings, walls, and appliances are all yellow. There's a window in the far distance.
An image of a STORE FRONT that was posted as an apartment on Craigslist. The store front has ceiling-to-floor windows that give full view of the inside of the apartment. The windows have the word 'PAIN' painted on, with photos of people rubbing their backs in agony.
Screenshot of an Instagram reel. The image shows the face of a man speaking with a text caption above his head. The caption reads: 'Yay another weird looking guy that is allegedly attractive in media even though not a single perosn youll ever meet finds them attractive.'
A screenshot of the video game Tomodachi Island. Eight characters are shown jumping in a classroom. Each one looks like a psycho- or neurolinguist that I have worked with.
A figure showing that MEG activity results in a reduced positive field around 300–500ms and a reduced negative field 650–900ms in Nepali for differential object-marking
A schematic showing that object NPs in Hindi agree with the verb in the perfective, if the object NP is not differentially object marked. In Nepali, there is always subject agreement.
A photo of myself and the class (approximately 20 undergraduate linguistics students) standing in front of two posters.
A selfie of me in a crappy vampire outfit from Spirit wearing a piece of paper with a diagram of a mereology structure as used in semantics papers on count vs mass nouns
Screenshot of an error message from Elsevier. It says 'Sorry. Something isn't working. If there's still a problem, please contact your administrator or helpdesk.'
Photo of Jean E. Fox Tree presenting
Flyer advertising the event. The text reads: BAyLI at UCSC Keynote Speaker Jean E. Fox Tree, UCSC Talk to me like a friend Lightning Talks Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao, UCSC Modeling interference with distributed representations of lexical, morphological, and positional information. Subhekshya Shrestha, UCSC Moto or mot-o? How lexical access and morphosyntactic relations are processing during at-a-glance reading in Spanish Maya Yablonski, Stanford Connectivity and function of the visual word form area: Insights from large-scale databases and a longitudinal intervention study Daniel Pfaff, UCSC Beyond single methodologies: Applying co-registration of EEG and ET to psycholinguistics Ma Angela Montiel, UCSC Cognitive control recruitment by linguistic cues during discourse comprehension Oct 10, 1:30-5:00 PM Namasté Lounge, UCSC
Subhs presenting her poster
My cat Olly, an orange Arabian mau, sitting on a couch next to a stuffed gray neuron toy on a yellow blanket
A concluding slide from Poeppel’s talk, showing the Earth in space from the surface of the moon. An ASL interpreter is signing.
Group selfie at the Nintendo store. From left-to-right: Me, Ruoqing Yao, Pikachu, Subhekshya Shrestha, Tovah Irwin
X-ray of an image of the bony part of a cat’s mouth, showing his canine tooth and the root above it
Screenshot of a news article from UAE Barq. The headline reads: 'During match, bilionaire who played polo dies after swallowing bee – bee was stung in the mouth while riding his horse.'
Left-to-right: Hareem Khokhar (PhD student), Rishika Isanaka (RA), myself, Jason Schwartz (RA), Subhekshya Shrestha (PhD student)
A photo of Tyson Jordan (central) smiling, with his committee Frederick Maier (left), Jin Sun (right) and myself (in back, projected on a screen)
A picture of me and my two RAs smiling and standing in a hallway. The RA on the left is holding our poster
A screenshot of myself, John Hale, Peggy Renwick, and Donnie Dunagan smiling in a Zoom call
Screenshot of a spam e-mail. The text reads: "Dear ChacĂłn Dustin A, The following message was sent by the journal on the date of 10 March, 2025. You failed to receive this message, or intentionally you are not responding (sorry if I am wrong). Kindly request your immediate attention to this email and respond within 24 hours to avoid the unnecessary email communications or maybe spam. We anticipate your prompt reply to prevent reminders. Regards, Valles Helen, Journal Operations Associate From: journalinvitations@papersrequest.com Sent: Monday, March 10, 2025 9:00:16 AM To: duchacon@ucsc.edu Subject: Re: duchacon@ucsc.edu | AMP Greetings ChacĂłn Dustin A, We have genuinely emailed you quite a lot of times but received no response, so we'd like to try once more as consideration. The most recent issue (New Edition) is missing one article. Could you please aid us by putting forward an article to this edition of Annals of Mathematics and Physics (ISSN: 2689-7636) before May 09, 2025? Please send in a research paper, review paper, mini-review, or case study. We believe that a two-page paper will not be too time-consuming for someone of your calibre if you have short notice. We are confident that you will always be available to help us. Our Sincere Request: Please acknowledge this invitation within 24 hours. Regards, Valles Helen, Journal Operations Associate |EIDT1036-AMP| If you are not comfortable with our emails, please unsubscribe.
A screenshot of Home Depot on Uber Eats. Items include three different kinds of plant fertilizer
Chat GPT prompt: Do you think that large language models disprove the Universal Grammar hypotheiss? ChatGPT said: That's a great and very current question—one that’s generating a lot of debate among linguists and cognitive scientists. In short: large language models (LLMs) like me challenge some aspects of the Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis, but they don’t disprove it outright. Let’s unpack that a bit. đŸ‘„ Where Dustin ChacĂłn Might Stand Given ChacĂłn's focus on syntax, cross-linguistic variation, and neurolinguistics, he might be especially interested in how LLMs handle cross-linguistic generalizations and whether they show human-like neural signatures of syntactic processing. He’d likely see LLMs as informative but insufficient on their own to explain language acquisition and processing in the human brain.
Chat-GPT Prompt: "Can you tell me about the neurolinguist Dustin Chacon?" Response: ​Dustin A. Chacón is a neurolinguist and psycholinguist specializing in syntactic processing, grammar-parser relations, language variation, language acquisition, and South Asian languages. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz). ​ Mastodon hosted on mstdn.social +2 Dustin A. Chacón +2 Google Scholar +2 Before joining UC Santa Cruz, Chacón held positions as a Research Scientist at the Neuroscience of Language Lab at New York University Abu Dhabi and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park, where his dissertation focused on "Comparative Psychosyntax." ​ Google Scholar +4 Department of Linguistics +4 Dustin A. Chacón +4 Chacón's research explores how the brain processes and represents grammatical structures, employing behavioral and electrophysiological techniques such as EEG and MEG. He has a particular interest in South Asian languages and has conducted studies on languages like Bangla and Hindi. His work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals, including studies on syntactic and semantic processing. ​ Linguistics +4 Franklin Linguistics +4 Dustin A. Chacón +4 In addition to his research, Chacón is recognized for his engaging teaching style. Students have noted his passion for linguistics and his ability to explain complex content in accessible ways. ​ RateMyProfessors
Entry from a Greenlandic-Danish-English dictionary. The meaning of 'aalisaq' is 'wallpaper'
A screenshot of fivethirtyeight.com's daily tracking of Trump's approval rating. Today is the first day that showed greater disapproval for Trump (47.9%) compared to approval (47.6%).
A digital drawing of Waluigi as The Fool from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Waluigi is depicted with a tennis racket over his shoulder and a mushroom in his hand walking off a cliff, and a Goomba is at his feet looking shocked. The color scheme uses the same pale cool colors and vibrant warm colors of the original Rider Waite deck
A diagram of a sentence. The first part shows a partial syntactic structure, with the words reading 'While Anna dressed'. The second tree structure says 'While Anna dressed the baby', with the NP 'the baby' occurring in both the complement of the VP of the subordinate clause and the subject NP position of the main clause. The two copies of the NP have red question marks next to them. The first tree is labeled 'pre-local ambiguity', and the second tree is labeled 'local ambiguity'. The trees are highlighted, and MIcrosoft Word offers an AI-generated alt text caption. The caption reads: 'a diagram of a baby and a baby.'
Copperajah, a Pokémon that's a green and bronze metallic elephant
Plot from the paper showing our results. Around 170-250ms, the brain distinguishes between morphologically complex words vs. simple words, and between strings and sentences. Around 200ms, brain data correlates with unigram frequency of words. Around 300ms, brain data distinguishes sentences from ungrammatical strings. Around 800ms, the brain data correlates with conditional probability of word given context
Two cats sitting on a bannister. One cat (Sniffle) in the background is gray and white, and is falling asleep. The other cat (Olly) in the foreground is orange and white and is still awake.
A selfie of me in the UCSC parking lot with a backpack on
An Uber Eats screenshot showing an order for chicken tikka masala
An orange and white cat who looks very high. His tongue is slipping out of his mouth
A stripmall storefront with 'First National Pawn' and 'Gigglebees' with two cars parked. The Gigglebees sign also says 'Pizza Games Fun Coca Cola' printed on white against a rainbow pattern
Screenshot of a journal article, titled 'The Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese: an fMRI Study'. The sentence 'although cheese is considered edible b ymost people it can also be perceived as particularly disgusting to some individuals.'
Email from my student loan provider congratulating me on paying off one of my student loans
An EEG timecourse plot showing greater positive activity for object relative clauses compared to subject relative clauses in right lateral sensors.
Bar graph showing greater accuracy for Subject RCs that modify subjects and Object RCs that modify objects; lower accuracy for Subject RCs that modify objects, and the least accuracy for Object RCs that modify subjects.
alt: 3.5 star review 'men will literally do this instead of going to therapy ass Film'
A hand-written letter explaining the etymology of the Chinese characteè ±. The text is half in Chinese and half in English, and the handwriting is child-like. The explanation is accompanied by simple pictographs, drawn by a child.
It’s a photo of me drinking a celebratory Pride beer in a rainbow dino tanktop
HSP 2024 poster. See biorxiv link for more details
HSP poster. Read the biorxix link for more information.
A clipart image of a girl standing next to a strange green contraption with a pin in it. It's a 'pin-nif'.
A photo of Peggy Renwick, Keith Langston, Emmy McNeely, and myself posing in front of her slides.