A Cognitive Neuroscientist asks: Can Artificial Intelligence "Understand" Language? | Professor T.D. Dwivedi Memorial Lecture Series

On December 5th, 2025, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Concordia University proudly hosted the 12th annual Professor T.D. Dwivedi Memorial Lecture series. This annual lecture series, established through an endowment and made possible through a generous contribution by the Dwivedi family, continues to be a tradition within our academic community. 

Dr. Veena D. Dwivedi is from the Centre for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology at Brock University. We were honored to have her as our speaker for the 2025 event. The lecture was followed by a reception to commemorate the occasion of the series 12th lecture. 

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics would like to extend gratitude to the Dwivedi family for their support and to Dr. Veena D. Dwivedi herself for a thought provoking presentation. 

Abstract

In this talk, I discuss how my research in the cognitive neuroscience of language and meaning addresses issues regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Namely, I will discuss the importance of appreciating differences between text and language and emphasize the on-going problem of inferring how the human brain handles contextual effects in sentence comprehension. I argue that the flexibility observed in human understanding and communication must follow from biological human brain network structure— something that a computer neural network is (as yet) unable to do.

Biography

Veena D. Dwivedi is Director of the Centre for Neuroscience at Brock University, where she is Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience. After her BSc in Physiology/Immunology from McGill University, she completed a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1994). She has pioneered the development of experimental studies using formal semantic theory, starting with behavioral work in 1992, then with Event Related Potentials (ERPs) starting in 2005. She runs a brain and language lab at Brock, where her current research brings together individual differences found in heuristic vs. algorithmic sentence processing, via examination of dispositional affect and mood.