Julien Dirani - Publications

Publications

Dirani, J., Chawla, S., Wehbe, L., & Mahon, B. Z. (2026). Contextual Role Modulates Object Representational Geometry in the Human Brain, arXiv:2605.23111.

Mallela, A. N., Belkhir, J. R., Reedy, E., Abou-Al-Shaar, H., Chen, J., Dirani, J., ... & Gonzalez-Martinez, J. A. (2026). Stimulus-response correlation analysis dissociates spatiotemporal cortical networks supporting speech production. bioRxiv, 2026-05.

Dirani, J., & Pylkkänen, L. (2024). MEG evidence that modality-independent conceptual representations contain semantic and visual features. Journal of Neuroscience, 44(27). [pdf]

Rein, D., Hou, B. L., Stickland, A. C., Petty, J., Pang, R. Y., Dirani, J., ... & Bowman, S. R. (2024, July). Gpqa: A graduate-level Google-proof Q&A benchmark. First Conference on Language Modeling.

Michael, J., Mahdi, S., Rein, D., Petty, J., Dirani, J., Padmakumar, V., & Bowman, S. R. (2023). Debate Helps Supervise Unreliable Experts, arXiv:2311.08702.

Dirani, J., & Pylkkänen, L. (2023). The time course of cross-modal representations of conceptual categories. NeuroImage, 277, 120254 [link]

Matar, S., Dirani, J., Marantz, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (2021). Left posterior temporal cortex is sensitive to syntax within conceptually matched Arabic expressions. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1-14. [link]

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2020). Lexical Access in Naming and Reading: Spatio-Temporal Localization of Semantic Facilitation and Interference Using MEG. Neurobiology of Language, 1(2), 185-207.. [link]

Fares, S., Dirani, J., & Darwish, H. (2019). Arabic validation of the Hopkins symptom checklist-25 (HSCL) in a Lebanese sample of adults and older adults. Current Psychology, 1-8. [link]

Dietrich, A., Dirani, J., & Yaghi, Z. (2018). The Reticular-Activating Hypofrontality (RAH) Model. In Handbook of Sport Neuroscience and Psychophysiology (pp. 385-396). Routledge. [link]

Dirani, J. & Dietrich, A. (2018). Analysis of letter representation using Latin and Arabic scripts: A masked priming study, J Psycholinguist Res. [link]

Invited Talks

Dirani, J. (2025). The interplay between conceptual representations and lexical processes in language. Clinical Neuroanatomy Seminars. (Recording available)

Wehbe, L. & Dirani, J. (2024). AI for Arabic language research: Obstacles and opportunities. The 37th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics

Dirani, J. (2024). Investigating the interplay between conceptual and lexical processes in language. Tandon Lab, UTHealth Houston

Dirani, J. (2024). Investigating the interplay between conceptual and lexical processes in language. Department of Fundamental Neurosciences, University of Geneva

Dirani, J. (2024). Investigating the interplay between conceptual representations and lexical processes in language. Research Institute of Science and Engineering, Waseda University

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2023). MEG evidence that modality-independent conceptual representations encode lexical but not low-level sensory features. Society for the Neurobiology of Language (15th Annual Meeting).

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2019). Lexical access in naming vs. reading: Spatiotemporal localization of semantic facilitation and interference. CUNY 2019 32nd Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2018). Lexical access in reading vs. naming: MEG evidence from semantic priming and inhibition. NYUAD Institute Conference 2018.

Conference Posters

Dirani, J., Belkhir, R., Reedy, E., Salazar, S., Liégeois-Chauvel, C., Aung, T., Mallela, A. N., González-Martínez, J. A., & Mahon, B. Z. (2025). Task-invariant decoding of semantic representations with intracranial human neurophysiology. 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2022). Modality independent representations of conceptual categories in object naming and word reading. International Workshop on Language Production.

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2022). Modality independent representations of conceptual categories in object naming and word reading. 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2022). Modality independent representations of conceptual categories in object naming and word reading. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2019). Part-whole but not whole-part relations elicit interference effects in object naming. 11th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Matar, S., Dirani, J., Marantz, A., & Pylkkänen, L. (2019). Lower LIFG activation for higher syntactic complexity: MEG evidence from conceptually-matched Arabic stimuli. 11th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Li, J., Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2019). Disentangling semantic association from semantic composition in the LATL. 11th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Dirani, J. & Pylkkänen, L. (2018). Lexical access in reading vs. naming: MEG evidence from semantic priming and inhibition. 10th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Matar, S., Dirani, J., Pylkkänen, L., & Marantz, A. (2018). Syntactic category prediction during reading: Evidence from adjectival modification in Standard Arabic. 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference.