Pleased to announce that I passed my PhD viva today!

My research/conference visit to Marseille and Aix is coming to a close and it's been a real adventure. Feel very grateful to be able to do things like this as part of my job. Lots of interesting conversations, great food, sightseeing, and productive collaboration. Hope to see you again soon 👋🏻

Very excited to announce that yesterday I submitted my PhD thesis: The Linguistic Life of the Kufr Qassem Deaf Community: Language Emergence, Variation, Change, and Persistence. I dedicate this thesis to my people: the resilient Palestinian people

Really enjoyed speaking at ESLP today! You can check out the slides for my presentation here: osf.io/nex2y

Who's coming to ESLP? 🇫🇷 ☺️

Let me know if you don't have access via your institution and I can send you a copy personally ☺️

Pleased that my new chapter that will be published in the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics has now been published online: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Pleased that my paper with @gabriellavigliocco.bsky.social, @fourtassi.bsky.social, Yan Gu, and Stefano James has been accepted as a talk at this year's Embodied and Situated Language Processing conference at Aix-Marseille University. Abstract below 👇

Currently wrapping up work on a Statistical Consultancy project for @marahjaraisy.bsky.social's investigation into the Kufr Qassem deaf community, focusing on semiotic strategies used for tracking referents in signed narratives, part of @adamcschembri.bsky.social's ERC-funded SignMorph grant. (1/4)

"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...

Pleased to have my first solo publication, 'Iconicity in language and communication', accepted for print in the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition. 😌

As we look ahead to the upcoming Corpus Linguistics Summer School (#CCRSS25, 7–11 July), we’ll be spotlighting our fantastic instructors and the sessions they’ll be leading. There’s still time to register—don’t miss out! www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edac...

New preprint paper (to appear in Journal of Linguistics) with @fbisnath.bsky.social, Hannah Lutzenberger, @marahjaraisy.bsky.social, and Rehana Omardeen 'Deconstructing notions of morphological ‘complexity’: Lessons from creoles and sign languages' Proud to be part of this team! osf.io/tmkrw

Anyone else get Solero vibes? Crazy how colours can trigger such strong associations/feelings.

Thanks for having me! If you couldn't make it, the slides can be downloaded at osf.io/p2h95.

Today at 1pm GMT!

This Wednesday (19th March) at 1pm GMT, I'll be virtually presenting this work, co-authored with @bodowinter.bsky.social and @lordlorson.bsky.social, at the University of Edinburgh's Psycholinguistics Coffee meeting. DM me or email me at [email protected] for the URL! ☺️

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

Our latest study, led by Chiara and Ben, investigates laughter mimicry and (acoustic) alignment in parent-child vs. adult conversations. Now published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Does anyone know of a regular expression or some other method of identifying questions in utterances? Not all the utterances I'm looking at are transcribed with question marks, and question-indicating words like 'what', 'why' etc. aren't always the first words in the utterance (e.g., 'and why...'.

Today!

I will be presenting this work at @davidmsidhu.bsky.social's Cognition, Language, Sound Symbolism, Iconicity (CLaSSI) Lab this Thursday (6th) at 17:00 GMT. Feel free to send either of us a DM or email and we'll get back to you with the Zoom link ☺️

Sign Language Contact, Variation, and Change 2025 conference at the University of Birmingham, UK: we are now inviting abstracts on any topic related to language contact/translanguaging, sociolinguistic variation, and language change in signing communities. sites.google.com/view/slcvc-w...

I think my new book Language, Image, Gesture: The Cognitive Semiotics of Politics might (finally!) have been published. Currently only in digital format with print copies available from Feb. www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...

Our new paper just got published at Nature Human Behavior! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We study trust in science in 68 countries and how it relates to other variables. It was wild to be part of this project 👌✨

Really enjoyed visiting @gabriellavigliocco.bsky.social and my new colleagues in the Language and Cognition Lab today! I presented a new paper examining round number frequencies, indefinite hyperbolic numbers (e.g., 'umpteen', 'squillion'), and rounding in jigsaw puzzles. Take a look: osf.io/kga4c

Very much enjoyed presenting my poster at #TISLR15 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia today! One important message in our poster is that factors like methodology, researcher's background, and language documentation may affect one's result. Happy to share/discuss more via DM or Email!

New paper out today in Frontiers in AI! The sociolinguistic foundations of language modelling We argue sociolinguistics provides a foundation for understanding LLMs and addressing many challenges www.frontiersin.org/journals/art... doi.org/10.3389/frai... techxplore.com/news/2025-01...

I made a #cognitivelinguistics starter park - please share and let me know who I missed! #linguistics #starterpack go.bsky.app/EtMaSX5

Updated Spatial & Numerical Cognition pack — still looking for more junior scientists 🔭🧪 go.bsky.app/4CXmSZM

I’m a multilingual, hardworking, enthusiastic linguist passionate about sociolinguistics, language contact, sign languages & gestures Ready to contribute my skills to a hybrid, remote (UK/Europe), or onsite (UK only) position Let’s chat if you know of opportunities! Let's turn Dr. into hireable 👩‍🎓💼

🎉 Big news! I'm submitting my PhD thesis this September! 📝✨ It's been a wild ride of research, resilience, and way too many snacks to fuel me, and now I’m officially on the hunt for my next adventure. 🚀

👀 👀 👀 Get in touch!

From today, I'll be working as a Research Fellow in Data Sciences at UCL on an exciting project exploring how social interactions between caregivers and children influence early vocabulary growth. 🧠🗣️ Looking forward to getting stuck into this fascinating work!

I made a starter pack of Iconicity Researchers! Please message me if you’d like to be added, or have suggestions for anyone else who should be added! go.bsky.app/C2F5iKC

🌟 Excited to share some news! 🌟—I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be joining the Language and Cognition lab at UCL as a Data Scientist in January. I’ll be working on an exciting project exploring how social interactions between caregivers and children influence early vocabulary growth. 🧠🗣️

Need help making sense of your data? 📊 Starting in 2025, I’ll be offering statistical consultancy services, specialising in Bayesian and frequentist mixed models, descriptive statistics, and data visualization tailored to your needs. ⬇️

1/ X's algorithm was changed in mid-July 2024 to systematically boost Republican-leaning accounts and Elon Musk's own account following his endorsement of Donald Trump, according to a newly released computational study of engagement from the Queensland University of Technology.⬇️

Congratulations to our very own @bodowinter.bsky.social @mperlman.bsky.social and their co-authors! Great to see their work on spoken language iconicity in the news. www.theguardian.com/science/2024...

Log frequencies of 'N seconds' and 'N minutes' in COCA for numbers 1–60, showing clear overrepresentation of multiples of 5. Strikingly similar patterns across the two scales. Radar plots superimposed on a clockface. Getting creative with it! 😅 I love this part of my job.

Here's a sneak preview of what I'm working on: a bumper paper comprising five analyses showcasing the prevalence of imprecision in number use. Numerical language is often vague, despite affording precision.

First post on Bluesky! 🥳 Here's the recording of a talk I presented a few months ago, hosted by the fantastic team at @discore.bsky.social. bit.ly/3B9IBQX Corpus methods have transformed discourse analysis. Here, I argue it's time to take #CADS a step further by combining it with experiments.

Leeds has a fully funded scholarship program for undergraduate and Masters study for Gaza students. **Tell Everyone** www.leeds.ac.uk/masters-scho...

Save the date: 21-22 August, 2025 'Sign language contact, variation, and change' workshop at University of Birmingham. More information soon!

Hi BlueSky! Check out our new paper on mouthing patterns in the bimodal multilingual deaf community of Kufr Qassem www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

As a huge fan of corpus linguistics, I thought it would be helpful to create a starter pack dedicated solely to this amazing field! go.bsky.app/RmFQ5NJ

Hi Bluesky: the department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham is now on Bluesky! Who else from our department is here? @jeannettel.bsky.social @matteofuoli.bsky.social @adamcschembri.bsky.social @bodowinter.bsky.social @gregwoodin.bsky.social

New preprint of our chapter "Defining iconicity for the cognitive sciences" is out! osf.io/5e3rc This is for the the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language.... was a blast to write with Greg Woodin and Marcus Perlman!

⚡New! The Anatomy of Iconicity, in Open Mind @mitpress.bsky.social — w/ Stella Punselie & Bonnie McLean Paper: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... This paper is a labour of love: an unrushed, student-involved, #SlowScience project that we're very proud of. Blog w/ background: ideophone.org/anatomy-of-i...

This starter pack from @neous.bsky.social will be useful for anyone interested in #multimodality. #AcademicSky #AcademicChatter @phdvoice.bsky.social go.bsky.app/QPLSxuX