Alessandro Lenci awarded an ERC 2025 Advanced Grant for the project CLIMB: Cognitively-Inspired Language Models for Investigating Human Language Acquisition and Processing#
Alessandro Lenci MAE, Full Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Department of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics at the University of Pisa
, was awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for the project CLIMB, Cognitively-Inspired Language Models for Investigating Human Language Acquisition and Processing.
Over the next five years, the project will study how humans acquire language to develop a new generation of artificial intelligence models inspired by the cognitive processes of human learning. By integrating linguistics, cognitive science, and developmental psychology, CLIMB aims to create more efficient, transparent, and sustainable AI systems, while also contributing to research on the mechanisms of language acquisition.
About CLIMB #
The CLIMB project aims to develop Language Models that are more cognitively grounded, with the goal of investigating the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition and processing. Large Language Models demonstrate near “superhuman” performance, but require equally “superhuman” amounts of training data and ignore key aspects of human design, such as spoken and visual input, social interaction, and cognitively grounded inductive biases. This misalignment limits their scientific relevance as models of language learning and their suitability as experimental testbeds for linguistic theories.
CLIMB introduces an integrated framework that draws on findings from linguistics, cognitive science, and developmental psychology. It will construct Language Models for multiple languages trained on ecologically valid, multimodal datasets structured by developmental stage, and with a theory-driven design including inductive biases informed by linguistic and cognitive research. These models will be tested on new challenging benchmarks enriched with behavioural and biometric data, and will serve as controlled experimental platforms for validating hypotheses about the structures of language, learning trajectories, and domain interactions, such as the interplay between syntactic and semantic processing. Interpretability analyses will track the emergence of the models’ representations and establish an explanatory framework to link them to linguistic theory.
CLIMB also contributes to artificial intelligence by demonstrating how a linguistically and cognitively motivated design can enhance efficiency, representational interpretability, and behavioural transparency. By focusing on smaller and accessible models, CLIMB will support the development of more sustainable, open language technologies. The project provides a rigorous framework for evaluating the linguistic validity of artificial learners, bridging the gap between computational modelling and human cognition.
About Alessandro Lenci#
Alessandro Lenci MAE is Full Professor in Linguistics at the University of Pisa, and the director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory (CoLingLab) at the Dept. of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics. He has extensively published on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and cognitive science. His main research areas are distributional semantics and its applications in linguistic and cognitive research, computational lexical semantics, computational models of verb argument structure, tools and resources for NLP. Prof. Lenci was elected as member of the Linguistic Studies Section of Academia Europaea in 2025.
Posted 17th August 2026 by Academia Europaea.
