People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/

📌 Curious to know more? Visit my website 👉 lnkd.in/d59v_TpH 📌 Looking for a PhD opportunity? The Spring admissions round at SISSA is now open and I’d be delighted to hear from prospective candidates (deadline: March 20, 1pm CET) 👉 lnkd.in/dvf6RuQd

Our new review paper (w/Anna Kuhlen) is out emphasising the cognitive complexities involved in everyday face-to-face conversation and a call for scaling up traditional psycholinguistic paradigms to better capture these complexities, esp multimodality, addressee responses and multiparty interactions.

Excited to co-teach Multimodal Minds this June with @anitaslonimska.bsky.social! See below for more information. www.ru.nl/en/education...

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation. New paper by @judithholler.bsky.social & Anna K. Kuhlen doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00538-1 rdcu.be/e4rlV

New open-access paper with @asliozyurek.bsky.social & Emanuela Campisi We extend relevance theory to a multimodal view of language, demonstrating that speakers explicitly highlight iconic gestures as communicatively relevant in knowledge transmission context 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I always thought preschoolers were too egocentric to do well on communication tasks where they had to talk about novel referents. Old papers reported they'd say stuff like "this one looks like my uncle's hat." @vboyce.bsky.social shows that this is wrong! osf.io/preprints/ps...

You can read the full chapter here: Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages | Max Planck Institute share.google/rzwFU9EpdXJb...

I'm honored to have been awarded an NWO Rubicon grant! ⭐ Later this year, I will be joining the Spoken Language group at the @bcbl.bsky.social. Looking forward to more research on the cognitive mechanisms involved in perceptual learning, with @effiekapnoula.bsky.social and Arthur Samuel 🤩

📢 心理言語学（文処理）の概説書が出ました! 心理言語学は大学の言語学の講義であまり扱われることがないので学ぶ機会が少ないと思うのですが、この本を読めば、「ひとが言葉を理解・産出する仕組み」に関する古典的な知見から最新の研究（予測処理、自然言語処理の技術を用いた計算モデリング的研究など）まで理解できるようになっています。第1章で、研究するときに身につけておきたい基本的な考え・研究のコツも紹介しているので学部生・院生のかたもぜひ。 本書が少しでも心理言語学に関心のある多くのひとに読まれ、今後、言語学内外の様々な分野との交流の契機になればとても嬉しく思います🍀

ECRs in the Spotlight: @shoakamine.bsky.social from @mpi-nl.bsky.social Sho's PhD is all about #multimodality in online video-mediated communication (such as #Zoom) 📹 Read the interview 👇 medal.ut.ee/news/ecrs-in...

Team science (all shared authorship), pre-registered, diamond open access paper now accepted at Open Mind: "Foreign Language Learners Show a Kinematic Accent in Their Co-speech Hand Movements". with Bosker, Marieke Hoetjes, Doenja Hustin, Lieke van Maastricht www.wimpouw.com/files/POSTPR...

for all of you using the ALIGN library (to measure lexical, syntactic and semantic alignment in conversations), Nick Duran has put together a great refactoring: ALIGN 2.0 (github.com/nickduran/al...), now integrated with Spacy and Bert

www.envisionbox.org has been shortlisted for the Leo Waaijers Open Science price: ukb.nl/en/news/shor... @babajideowoyele.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @sarkadava.bsky.social @DavideAhmar @acwiek.bsky.social Amazing Markus Küpper made an animated video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HduI...

👀 👂 How does the brain merge what we hear & see? @lindadrijvers.bsky.social got an ERC Starting Grant (≈ €1.5M) for HANDWAVE, studying how we integrate audiovisual signals. Vital for understanding language disorders & improving diagnostics.👇 www.ru.nl/en/research/...

The physical book copies have arrived: www.routledge.com/Introduction...

Please help me learn! I see people using CI for hypothesis testing (whether 95% CIs for slope cover 0), but Nicenboim, Schad &Vasishth say in their fantastic book that "just by looking at the [CIs], we cannot make inferences about whether a null hypothesis can be rejected". Why is this the case?

Our conversation analysis software is now on CRAN! Reach out with any questions. We hope it’s useful for all you language and social interaction folks out there.

Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/ www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social

At this point, I might as well -- Here's an infographic showing different ways to include age as a predictor. The top shows two extremes, just as a plain old numerical predictor (imposes linear trajectory) vs. categorical predictor (imposes nothing whatsoever). And then three solutions in between!

Sho presents his work validating dynamic time warping to a rapt #ISGS2025 audience. Lots of engagement afterwards #ProudSupervisor

Are you at #ISGS2025 today? Come see my talk in the kinematics session! I'll present my PhD work validating dynamic time warping (DTW) as a measure of gesture form similarity with manual ratings. We show that DTW can be an efficient, useful proxy for gesture form similarity!

Excited to present at ISGS25 this Thursday morning in Nijmegen! Together with @shariceclough.bsky.social , we’ll be sharing our work on the role of gesture in narrative recall across Alzheimer’s, MCI, and healthy aging. Looking forward to great discussions! 💪🏻🧠🗣️ #ISGS25

Let's say you want to include age as a predictor in your model. How do you do that? Here's an illustration of three options -- it's for a paper I'm working on (so if you feel like anything could be tweaked...).

We're hiring! Join us to work at the intersection of social interaction and language technology. Postdoc and PhD positions in my Futures of Language research group, based at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL Read more: markdingemanse.net/futures/news... #linguistics #interaction #sts #emca #hci

Two nice papers now added to my primer of what to read about theory in cognitive science ... docs.google.com/document/d/1... 1/

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

📣 Calling early-career cognitive scientists in the Asia-Pacific! The CogSci Asia-Pacific Meetup Kickoff is coming: 📍 Dec 6–7, 2025 | Tokyo 🌱 Retreat-style event, community building, and cross-cultural exchange. Details: sites.google.com/view/cogsci-... #CogSci2025 #CognitiveScience

Absolutely. I also did this with all the figures I created for my textbook! osf.io/geqb6/

Pro tip, folks: if you make a figure for a publication, don’t just hand the copyright over to the publisher. Post it on OSF first and then give yourself permission to use it in the first publication and then all future publications. That way, no permissions issues.

#NextGenSci asked young scientists to write a rule that all principal investigators should be required to follow to improve the experience of young scientists in their lab. Check out their answers on #NationalHigherEducationDay: scim.ag/45zsFEr

The Causal Bandits episode with me is finally up! We talked about a hodge-podge of causal inference and methods issues. I already got one positive testimonial from my boss who listened to the first half and liked it!

“As the presenter, assume that most questions are designed to help you. The questioner may well be trying to help you make your points more clearly, develop your claims, or provide helpful ideas for future work. Take every question as an opportunity to learn and think. Try not to be defensive”

"Human voice aligns with whole-body kinetics" is now published! royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.... Headline: Muscles that control arm movement affect the voice! The EMG, acoustic, ground-reaction force, kinematics dataset is also fully open and FAIR reviewed: github.com/WimPouw/kine...

my lab (lacns.github.io) at @mpi-nl.bsky.social and @dondersinst.bsky.social is recruiting for two PhD and two postdoctoral positions funded by an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator - come join us! PhD: www.mpi.nl/career-educa... Postdoc: www.mpi.nl/career-educa... (please share widely)

Summer Workshop Alert‼️ The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan organizes on July 1 a hands-on DeepLabCut workshop led by Drs. Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis. Applications are open at www.oist.jp/conference/d...

How do we build theory in cogsci? traditional physics w its rich data and experimental possibilities is often used as parangon. We argue historical sciences provide an equally rich source: "Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect": doi.org/10.1007/s421... 🧵 1/

Please join @asliozyurek.bsky.social, @tanialombrozo.bsky.social, Hannah Rohde and me **this Wednesday 12pm eastern**. What does the future of cogsci in higher ed look like? I promise it's not all bad news!! Register below!

It's bonkers that in academic science we spend hours obsessing over the wording of a paper, but often only one person has seen the code that produced the results! 2/N

Interested in the evolution of human language and in understanding the pressures that shape languages today? Come do a PhD with me! Fully funded PhD position available in my group @mpi-nl.bsky.social, application deadline June 2nd: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

If anyone is interested in using WhisperX to transcribe speech, this tutorial is for you!! In this tutorial, I provide an easy-to-use pipeline where you will get a time-aligned transcript as a Praat TextGrid file, a TSV file, and a subtitle file🙌 github.com/ShoAkamine/w...

>The earliest statisticians would spend hours thinking about their assumptions and models because the computations themselves might have taken days. Today we call those people Bayesians

New R package almost birthed - SemanticDistance - computes two semantic distance metrics (experiential and embedding) for any rolling chunk size (ngram-to-ngram, word-to-word, turn-to-turn, ngram-to-word). You give it your language sample. It does the rest, including lemmatize and stopword omit

I'm now searching for new PhD students who are interested in studying how people's brains understand sequences of images like in comics. So, a mix of comics, cogneuro (EEG), and psycholinguistics (especially syntax/semantics). Please circulate to all who might be interested! tiu.nu/22739

Inaugural post on bsky: The ECOLANG Multimodal Corpus, providing audiovisual recordings and annotations of multimodal communicative behaviours by English-speaking adults in dyadic interaction with a child or another adult is now available rdcu.be/eblMF

Inspired by my reading this week, I wrote a list of the resources I think every cognitive science researcher should read/listen to about theory development. It's in this google.doc (feel free to add your own suggestions) and in the thread below. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Update: Our biomechanics EMG/Posture study on voice and upper limb kinetics has been accepted at Proceedings B. We show that moving the arms (while manipulating mass) recruits (postural) muscles that interact with the voice through respiratory interactions. Postprint: wimpouw.com/files/Pouwet...

Hora est! 🎓 On Friday I successfully defended my PhD thesis "On how gestures facilitate prediction and fast responding during conversation", which can be found here (lnkd.in/eewcJYyt). It was an absolutely fantastic day! 😍

This paper combining corpus and experimental avatar studies from Paul’s PhD work is finally out, demonstrating systematic relations between verbal repair formats and eyebrow movements, as well an influence of addressees’ eyebrow furrows on speakers’ speech.