Publications

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

(* denotes equal contribution)

Increasing large language models’ alignment with language processing in the human brain
Changjiang Gao*, Zhengwu Ma*, Jiajun Chen, Ping Li, Shujian Huang and Jixing Li*. 2025.
Nature Computational Science Paper

Naturalistic fMRI and MEG recordings during viewing of a reality TV show
Jixing Li, Qiang Wang, Yike Wang, Chengcheng Wang, Zhengwu Ma, Ruixuan Xu, Shiyan Feng, Xiaoming Jiang and Zhaoli Meng. 2025.
Scientific Data OpenNeuro Paper

Le Petit Prince (LPP) Multi-talker: Naturalistic 7T fMRI and EEG dataset
Qixuan Wang, Qian Zhou, Zhengwu Ma, Nan Wang, Tianyu Zhang, Yaoyao Fu and Jixing Li. 2025.
Scientific Data OpenNeuro Paper

Le Petit Prince Hong Kong (LPPHK): Naturalistic fMRI and EEG dataset from older Cantonese
Mohammad Momenian, Zhengwu Ma, Shuyi Wu, Chengcheng Wang, Jonathan Brennan, John Hale, Lars Meyer and Jixing Li. 2024.
Scientific Data OpenNeuro Paper

Peer-reviewed Conference Papers

Traces in the brain: Neural evidence for syntactic movement in English and Chinese.
Yuhan Huang, Zhengwu Ma, Yuqi Jin, Beth Chan, Zheng Shen, Jackie Lai, John Hale and Jixing Li. 2026.
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026.

Conflicts make large reasoning models vulnerable to attacks.
Honghao Liu, Chengjin Xu, Xuhui Jiang, Cehao Yang, Shengming Yin, Zhengwu Ma, Lionel Ni and Jian Guo. 2026.
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026.

Non-literal meaning representation in the brain during naturalistic listening.
Zhengwu Ma, Yuhan Huang, Chengcheng Wang and Jixing Li. 2026.
In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2026)

Do Large language models acquire phrase-based processing? Evidence from eye movements, fMRI encoding, and model-brain alignment after fine-tuning.
Xufeng Duan, Zhengwu Ma, Zhaoqian Yao, Jixing Li and Zhenguang Cai
In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2026)

Book Chapter

MRI datasets for language processing
Jixing Li, Zhengwu Ma, and Chengcheng Wang. In press.
International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition. Elsevier.