Publications

Theses, Books & Monographs

Evelina Leivada & Kleanthes K. Grohmann (eds.). In press/2026. The Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism and its Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Evelina Leivada (eds.). In press/2026. The Cambridge Handbook of the Minimalist Program. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lluís Barceló-Coblijn & Evelina Leivada (eds.). 2021. Biolinguistic Research in the 21st Century. Biolinguistics.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Kambanaros & Evelina Leivada (eds.). 2018. Developmental, modal, and pathological variation: Linguistic and cognitive profiles for speakers of linguistically proximal languages and varieties. Frontiers in Psychology.
Evelina Leivada. 2015. The nature and limits of variation across languages and pathologies. Doctoral dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona.

Preprints

Raquel Montero, Natalia Moskvina, Paolo Morosi, Tamara Serrano, Elena Pagliarini & Evelina Leivada. Preprint. Quantification and object perception in Multimodal Large Language Models deviate from human linguistic cognition. arXiv.
Nikoleta Pantelidou, Evelina Leivada & Paolo Morosi. Preprint. Resource-sensitive but language-blind: Community size and not grammatical complexity better predicts the accuracy of Large Language Models in a novel Wug Test. arXiv.
Evelina Leivada, Raquel Montero, Paolo Morosi, Natalia Moskvina, Tamara Serrano, Marcel Aguilar & Fritz Günther. Preprint. Large Language Model probabilities cannot distinguish between possible and impossible language. arXiv.
Vittoria Dentella, Weihang Huang, Silvia Angela Mansi, Jack Grieve & Evelina Leivada. Preprint. ChatGPT-generated texts show authorship traits that identify them as non-human. arXiv.
Philipp Schoenegger, Francesco Salvi, Jiacheng Liu, Xiaoli Nan, Ramit Debnath, Barbara Fasolo, Evelina Leivada, +32 authors. Preprint. Large Language Models are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders. arXiv.
Evelina Leivada, Fritz Günther, Camilla Masullo, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Marit Westergaard & Jason Rothman. Preprint. A multi-metric analysis of 50,000 linguistic profiles provides sparse evidence that language distance modulates bilingual cognition. PsyArXiv.

Journal Articles

Evelina Leivada, Gary Marcus, Fritz Günther & Elliot Murphy. 2026. A sentence is worth a thousand pictures: Can Large Language Models understand hum4n l4ngu4ge and the w0rld behind w0rds? In production, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
Elliot Murphy, Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella, Raquel Montero, Fritz Günther & Gary Marcus. 2025. Fundamental principles of linguistic structure are not represented by ChatGPT. Biolinguistics 19, e19021.
Evelina Leivada, Lara Kelly-Iturriaga, Camilla Masullo, Marit Westergaard & Jason Rothman. 2025. The unpredictable role of language distance in bilingual cognition: A systematic review from brain to behavior. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition.
Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Günther & Evelina Leivada. 2025. Language learning in vivo vs. in silico: Size matters but Larger Language Models still do not comprehend language on a par with humans due to impenetrable semantic reference. PLoS ONE 20(7), e0327794.
Camilla Masullo, Alba Casado, Evelina Leivada & Antonella Sorace. 2025. Register variation and linguistic background modulate accuracy in detecting morphosyntactic errors. Isogloss 11(1), 1-36.
Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Günther, Elliot Murphy, Gary Marcus & Evelina Leivada. 2024. Testing AI on language comprehension tasks reveals insensitivity to underlying meaning. Nature Scientific Reports 14, 28083.
Evelina Leivada, Fritz Günther & Vittoria Dentella. 2024. Reply to Hu et al: Applying different evaluation standards to humans vs. Large Language Models overestimates AI performance. PNAS 121(36), e2406752121.
Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella & Fritz Günther. 2024. Evaluating the language abilities of humans vs. Large Language Models: Three caveats. Biolinguistics 18, e14391.
Camilla Masullo, Alba Casado & Evelina Leivada. 2024. The role of minority language bilingualism in spotting agreement attraction errors: Evidence from Italian varieties. PLoS ONE 19(2), e0298648.
Vittoria Dentella, Camilla Masullo & Evelina Leivada. 2024. Bilingual disadvantages are systematically compensated by bilingual advantages across tasks and populations. Nature Scientific Reports 14, 2107.
Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Günther & Evelina Leivada. 2023. Systematic testing of three Language Models reveals low language accuracy, absence of response stability, and a yes-response bias. PNAS 120(51), e2309583120.
Evelina Leivada. 2023. A classification bias and an exclusion bias jointly overinflated the estimation of publication biases in bilingualism research. Behavioral Sciences 13, 812.
Natalia Mitrofanova, Evelina Leivada & Marit Westergaard. 2023. Crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition: Evidence from artificial language learning. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 13, 717-742.
Camilla Masullo, Vittoria Dentella & Evelina Leivada. 2023. 73% of the observed bilingual (dis)advantageous effects on cognition stem from sociolinguistic factors: A systematic review. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition 27, 480–494.
Evelina Leivada, Elliot Murphy & Gary Marcus. 2023. DALL-E 2 fails to reliably capture common syntactic processes. Social Sciences & Humanities Open 8, 100648.
Evelina Leivada, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, Maria Carmen Parafita Couto & Sílvia Perpiñán. 2023. Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward. Applied Psycholinguistics 44, 384-399.
Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella, Camilla Masullo & Jason Rothman. 2022. On trade-offs in bilingualism and moving beyond the Stacking the Deck fallacy. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition 26, 550-555.
Evelina Leivada. 2022. Determining the cognitive biases behind a viral linguistic universal: The order of multiple adjectives. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications 9, 436.
Elliot Murphy & Evelina Leivada. 2022. A model for learning strings is not a model of language. PNAS 119(23), e2201651119.
Evelina Leivada & Elliot Murphy. 2022. A demonstration of the uncomputability of parametric models of language acquisition and a biologically plausible alternative. Language Development Research 2(1), 105-138.
Evelina Leivada. 2022. Linguistics as science, language as mystery. Inference: International Review of Science 6, 4.
Evelina Leivada. 2021. The origins of music in (musi)language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44, e104.
Evelina Leivada, Natalia Mitrofanova & Marit Westergaard. 2021. Bilinguals are better than monolinguals in detecting manipulative discourse. PLoS ONE 16(9), e0256173.
Evelina Leivada & Elliot Murphy. 2021. Mind the (terminological) gap: Ten misused, ambiguous, or polysemous terms in linguistics. Ampersand 8, 1-9.
Evelina Leivada & Lluís Barceló-Coblijn. 2021. Why don’t languages grammaticalize [± poisonous]? Biolinguistics 14.SI, 51-58.
Evelina Leivada. 2021. Mid-level generalizations of generative linguistics: Experimental robustness, cognitive underpinnings and the interdisciplinarity paradox. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 39(3), 357-374.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Kambanaros, Evelina Leivada & Natalia Pavlou. 2021. On “free” grammatical variation in a mixed lect: Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 39(3), 275-298.
Evelina Leivada. 2020. Language processing at its trickiest: Grammatical illusions and heuristics of judgment. Languages 5(3), 29.
Evelina Leivada, Marit Westergaard, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia & Jason Rothman. 2020. On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (How) should we proceed? Bilingualism: Language & Cognition 24, 197–210.
Evelina Leivada & Marit Westergaard. 2020. Acceptable ungrammatical sentences, unacceptable grammatical sentences, and the role of the cognitive parser. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 364.
Evelina Leivada. 2020. Misused terms in linguistics. Inference: International Review of Science 5, 2. [pdf]
Evelina Leivada, Roberta D’Alessandro & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2019. Eliciting big data from small, young or non-standard languages: 10 experimental challenges. Frontiers in Language Sciences 10, 313.
Evelina Leivada & Marit Westergaard. 2019. Universal linguistic hierarchies are not innately wired. Evidence from multiple adjectives. PeerJ 7, e7438.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Kambanaros & Evelina Leivada. 2018. Developmental, modal, and pathological variation (editorial article). Frontiers in Psychology 9, 1804.
Evelina Leivada. 2017. What’s in (a) Label? Neural origins and behavioral manifestations of Identity Avoidance in language and cognition. Biolinguistics 11, 1-30.
Evelina Leivada. 2017. The primitives of the lexicon: Insights from aspect in idioms. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1), 105.
Evelina Leivada, Maria Kambanaros & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2017. The Locus Preservation Hypothesis: Shared linguistic profiles across developmental disorders and the resilient part of the human language faculty. Frontiers in Psychology 8, 1-14.
Evelina Leivada, Elena Papadopoulou & Natalia Pavlou. 2017. Functionally equivalent variants in a non-standard variety and their implications for Universal Grammar: A spontaneous speech corpus. Frontiers in Language Sciences 8, 1-12.
Evelina Leivada, Maria Kambanaros, Loukia Taxitari & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2017. (Meta)linguistic abilities of bilectal educators. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1003-1018.
Evelina Leivada, Elena Papadopoulou, Maria Kambanaros & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2017. The influence of bilectalism and non-standardization on the perception of native grammatical variants. Frontiers in Psychology 8, 1-11.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Kambanaros, Evelina Leivada & Charley Rowe. 2016. A developmental approach to diglossia: Bilectalism on a gradient scale to linguality. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 52(4), 629-662.
Evelina Leivada. 2016. Vision, language, and a protective mechanism towards psychosis. Neuroscience Letters 617, 178-181.
Evelina Leivada. 2015. X-within-X structures and the nature of categories. Biolinguistics 9, 50-73.
Evelina Leivada. 2015. Aphasic grammar: Why are some parts (un)impaired? Stem-, Spraak- en Taalpathologie 20(S01), 85-89.
Constantina Theofanopoulou, Pedro Tiago Martins, Javier Ramirez, Elizabeth Zhang, Gonzalo Castillo, Edward Shi, Saleh Alamri, Anna Martínez-Alvarez & Evelina Leivada. 2015. Neurological foundations of language: Emerging perspectives. Llengua, Societat i Comunicació 13, 4-11.
Evelina Leivada & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2014. Clitics in idioms: Properties of morphosyntax and reference. Lingua 150, 45-70.
Elena Papadopoulou, Evelina Leivada & Natalia Pavlou. 2014. Acceptability judgments in bilectal populations: Competition, gradience and socio-syntax. Linguistic Variation 14(1), 109-128.
Evelina Leivada. 2014. From comparative languistics to comparative (bio)linguistics: Reflections on variation. Biolinguistics 8, 53-66.
Evelina Leivada & Cedric Boeckx. 2014. Schizophrenia and cortical blindness: Protective effects and implications for language. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, 1-12.
Cedric Boeckx, Anna Martínez-Álvarez & Evelina Leivada. 2014. The functional neuroanatomy of serial order in language. Journal of Neurolinguistics 32, 1-15.
Cedric Boeckx & Evelina Leivada. 2014. On the particulars of Universal Grammar: Implications for acquisition. Language Sciences 46, 189-198.
Cedric Boeckx, Anna Martínez-Álvarez & Evelina Leivada. 2013. On the theoretical characterization of agrammatism: Resolving a paradox. Stem-, Spraak- en Taalpathologie 18(S01), 22-24.
Cedric Boeckx, Evelina Leivada & Pedro Tiago Martins. 2013. Language and complexity considerations: A biolinguistic perspective. Llengua, Societat i Comunicació 11, 20-26.
Cedric Boeckx & Evelina Leivada. 2013. Entangled parametric hierarchies: Problems for an overspecified Universal Grammar. PLoS ONE 8(9), e72357.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters & Conference Proceedings

Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella & Elliot Murphy. To appear. The Quo Vadis of the relationship between language and Large Language Models. In José-Luis Mendívil-Giró (ed.), Artificial Knowledge of Language. Wilmington, DE: Vernon. [preprint]
Evelina Leivada & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. To appear. The Minimalist Program in the 2020s: Theory, methodology, and the road ahead. In Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Evelina Leivada (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Minimalist Program. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [preprint]
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Natalia Pavlou, Constantina Fotiou & Evelina Leivada. 2024. Bilectal investigations of grammar: A view from Cyprus. In Giuliana Giusti, Piergiorgio Mura & Cristina Procentese (eds.), Language Attitudes and Bi(dia)lectal Competence. Venice: Venice University Press.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Kambanaros & Evelina Leivada. 2021. The mirage of the “impaired passive” and the Locus Presentation Hypothesis. In Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Akemi Matsuya & Eva-Maria Remberger (eds.), Passives Cross-Linguistically: Theoretical and Experimental Approaches. Leiden: Brill.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Evelina Leivada. 2020. Reconciling linguistic theories on comparative variation with an evolutionarily plausible language faculty. In András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Jamie Douglas & Sten Vikner (eds.), Syntactic architecture and its consequences II: Between syntax and morphology. Berlin: Language Science Press. [pdf]
Evelina Leivada & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2017. Language acquisition in bilectal environments: Competing motivations, metalinguistic awareness, and the Socio-Syntax of Development Hypothesis. In Matthias Katerbow & Gunther de Vogelaer (eds.), Variation in Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cedric Boeckx, Pedro Tiago Martins & Evelina Leivada. 2017. Biolinguistics. In Adam Ledgeway & Ian Roberts (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pedro Tiago Martins, Evelina Leivada, Lluís Barceló-Coblijn, Antonio Benítez-Burraco & Cedric Boeckx. 2016. Biological pluralism in service of biolinguistics. In Cedric Boeckx & Koji Fujita (eds.), Advances in Biolinguistics: The Human Language Faculty and its Biological Basis. London: Routledge.
Elena Papadopoulou, Evelina Leivada & Natalia Pavlou. 2014. Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek: A matter of lexical and syntactic stimulation? In Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Theoni Neokleous (eds.), Developments in the Acquisition of Clitics. Newcastle-upon-Type: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Natalia Pavlou, Evelina Leivada & Elena Papadopoulou. 2013. The Cypriot embu and cleft sentences: An investigation of their (non)-exhaustive properties. In Mark Janse, Brian D. Joseph, Angela Ralli & Metin Bagriacik (eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory. Online Proceedings, Patras.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Evelina Leivada. 2013. Lightverbhood in child language: Evidence from Cypriot Greek. In Elma Blom, Josje Verhagen & Ineke van de Craats (eds.), Dummy Auxiliaries in First and Second Language Acquisition. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Evelina Leivada, Elena Papadopoulou & Natalia Pavlou. 2013. The gray area of acceptability judgments: Clefts and exhaustivity in Cypriot Greek. In Kelechukwu E. Ihemere (ed.), Language Contact: A Multidimensional Perspective. Newcastle-upon-Type: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Evelina Leivada. 2012. Interface ingredients of dialect design: Bi-X, Socio-Syntax of Development, and the grammar of Cypriot Greek. In Anna Maria Di Sciullo (ed.), Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Eleni Theodorou, Natalia Pavlou, Evelina Leivada, Elena Papadopoulou & Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro. 2012. The development of object clitic placement in Cypriot Greek and the Romance connection. In Sandrine Ferré, Philippe Prévost, Laurie Tuller & Rasha Zebib (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the Romance Turn IV Workshop on the Acquisition of Romance Languages. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Evelina Leivada, Paraskevi Mavroudi & Anna Epistithiou. 2010. Metalanguage or bidialectism? Acquisition of clitic placement by Hellenic Greeks, Greek Cypriots and binationals in the diglossic context of Cyprus. Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics 2010 — 25-27 August 2010, Athens, Greece. Athens: ISCA and the University of Athens. [email me for a copy]
Paraskevi Mavroudi, Evelina Leivada & Anna Epistithiou. 2010. Acquisition of lightverbhood: Evidence from Cypriot Greek. Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics 2010 — 25-27 August 2010, Athens, Greece. Athens: ISCA and the University of Athens. [email me for a copy]