📢 My department is hiring! University of Chicago is hiring an Assistant Professor in Phonology! (EOE/Vet/Disability) See the link for more information. 📢 jobs.chronicle.com/job/37894671...

Fodor in 'Concepts': "When Pinker's analyses are clear enough to evaluate, they are often just wrong."

the concept of putting vowel inventories on ✨aesthetic🪐 backgrounds... phonologists take notes

Pomona College Ling and CogSci Dept is hiring an Assistant Professor with a specialization in phonetics! (Deadline Nov 1) linguistlist job ad is here: linguistlist.org/issues/36/27.... Any questions can be directed to Michael Diercks, chair of the search committee ([email protected]).

In Tomas Riad's Phonology of Swedish, he gives the example of mustaschtävling `moustache contest' as an example where /ʂ/ triggers retroflexion on the following consonent (it mostly doesn't do so). Sometimes you really wonder how facts like this came to be discovered.

I really do love doing phonology

Best quote of AMP came from Stuart Davis in a Q&A session: “I don’t know anything about K-pop.”

I had my research group try salty swedish black licorice today and let me tell you it was not a hit.

I saw Mary Lattimore perform last night at a small bar in Urbana and it kind of changed my life. One of the most beautiful and peaceful hours of my life listening to her play.

“Formalizing the Venetian ‘Evanescent’ /l/: A Three-Perspective Analysis” by Anna Stephanov and Scott Nelson at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) at UC Berkeley, Sep. 25–26, ’25 drive.google.com/file/d/1oj8O...

This is my first weekend not away in a month so I am sitting in the sun listening to Grandaddy and it feels GOOD.

Spent almost all day standing at my new standing desk and just submitted a journal article. I might have 4 straight hours of student meetings tomorrow, but today I'm feeling good.

My cousin’s child (1;10) was introduced to my niece whose name is Leighton. My cousin said this is Lei[ʔn̩] and seconds later her child repeated it back as Lei[tɨn] with a full [t]. A gigantic win for abstractionists.

when you decide that yes, you're going to assign your own paper in the grad seminar

🚨Postdoctoral fellowship in corpus phonetics / data science for speech with me and Ann Bradlow. Position is open immediately. Apply now! 🚨 Details: faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/matt-goldric...

I love reading about Gold's singular theorem.

Will spend the rest of my life considering how we were rushed into "going paperless" for the good of the environment only for the next generation of digital tools to become far worse for the environment.

This gallery of 200+ photographs of hand-painted storefront signs in the Detroit area just made my night. Reminds me of a past life driving to pick up vinyl at Archer Records pressing plant or god knows where for a random punk show. Michigan is the best. andrewandersonphoto.com/ron-signs

Even /vr/ is a valid English onset at the vegan diner

Yes, reinforcement learning is powerful, but what put all that structure in the learning data in the first place? A system with what capacities? What architecture? What evolutionary and developmental histories? That’s where AI-as-engineering ends and Cognitive Science begins!🤖🧠

I’m happy to share that my paper with Jeff Heinz on “the blueprint model of production” is finally published online in Phonology: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I had a go at sketching out BMP in python jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2...

Important to check out if you're interested in discrete vs. gradient representations and notions like 'cascading activation' in speech production

I’m happy to share that my paper with Jeff Heinz on “the blueprint model of production” is finally published online in Phonology: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Them: here's this algorithm; this is a Marrian computational level theory Me: ...I don't think that's <gets cut off> Them: here are some extensional properties of the function being computed; this is a Marrian algorithimic level theory Me: ...I don't think that's <gets cut off again> Them: Marr!

the hypothesis that the human brain can perform rule-based computations is theoretically extravagant, which is why i think it just does big ass linear algebra problems instead

the concepts & principles that computational theories of cognition rely on were pretty much all developed *before electronic computers existed*

The term "corn sweat" seems to be on the rise as I had never really heard it being used before this year. Went to Google Ngram Viewer to look at the trend. It does appear to be on the upswing, but also is less frequent than "sweat corn" which I assume is just a misspelling of "sweet corn".

I can’t even begin to explain what this track makes me feel. Many days I feel as if it is the best piece of music ever written. youtu.be/skf-EBUwAuc?...

Goodbye Eugene. It was nice to walk five miles a day and remain relatively comfortable, but I must now return to the corn sweat of the Midwest. Had a great time at both SCiL and DYMOS as well. Life is good

Here are my slides: www.scott-nelson.net/Presentation... I started my talk by saying, “usually when you’re a phonologist who is interested in phonetics you get more concrete but I decided to get more abstract instead.” If that’s of interest to you then you might be interested in checking these out!

A lot of Jerry Fodor and Midwest Emo posting on my timeline this week. This pleases me.

where do they FIND these people?!

Karthik Durvasula pointed me to Imre Lakatos’ “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs”. It really helped me pull together my thoughts on the philosophical underpinning of my dissertation. Found a hard copy at a used bookstore in Eugene, OR today. The world is kind.

From Eugenia Chang's 'The Joy of Abstraction': "It might seem that abstraction takes us further away from 'real' situations. This is superficially true, but at the same time abstraction enables us to make connections between situations that are further apart from one another."

woah, crazy revelations at the coldplay concert

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

Upcoming LSA Presidential Research Forum September 15, 2025 Tutorial on Logical Phonology (LP) Featuring Kyle Gorman, Rim Dabbous, and Charles Reiss Join us for a deep dive into LP! This forum highlights cutting-edge theoretical insights grounded in formal rigor! www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

Happy World Emoji Day🌎🥳📆!!! Let's all celebrate by reading my two published papers on the morphosyntactic combinatorics of emojis that function as "words"! Glossa paper: doi.org/10.16995/glo... JLCL paper: doi.org/10.21248/jlc... And more to come!! #worldemojiday

I will also be at SCiL this upcoming weekend and am staying in Eugene until DYMOS. So if anyone is at the LSA institute from the 19-28 and wants to meet up to talk about phonology/phonetics, computation, synthesizers, or really antything let me know.

Presenting some stuff from my dissertation at this cool workshop in a couple weeks on dynamical models of speech: samkirkham.github.io/dymos/ Doing a lot of reading/prep work as I am the "symbolicist" going to talk to a bunch of "dynamacists". Should be fun! (seriously)

Has anyone ever used "there was a farmer who had a dog and Bingo was his name(-o)" to explain ambiguous pronoun resolution?

Does anyone else find it perpetually annoying that what most folks would consider neural "computation" is Marr's "algorithmic" level, while his *computational* level is really just "what's the goal of this thing anyway?" AKA function.

I like this quote from Vinny Czarnecki's paper from SCiL this year because it makes explicit what I think I only made implicit in my dissertation. openpublishing.library.umass.edu/scil/article...

Annoyed at one page abstracts because I think they ultimately promote theoretical/formal homogeneity as there is not enough space to explain a non-standard approach AND show its use case.

Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.