📣 New paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in which we investigated whether conversational alignment — the tendency to reuse each other's words, syntactic constructions, topics, sounds and gestures — can be used as a reliable individual trait. It cannot! 🧵 1/4 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Really enjoyed presenting at @asifamajid.bsky.social's lab yesterday at the University of Oxford, where I shared some initial ideas for a project exploring pitch processing in speech prosody and musical melody, microtonal versus discrete-tone music, and gesture. Great to get everyone's feedback!

Does verbal (lexical, semantic) alignment btw caregiver and child support learning in 3-4 years old?

Data and analysis scripts are here: osf.io/9z5qn/overview

This one is for comics lovers and language lovers alike! A fun and inspiring read at the forefront of the multimodal language curve. Even works as intro to linguistics course book as it teaches a lot of core linguistic concepts really well, and in a modality-general manner. I can highly recommend!

Really enjoyed chatting to everyone yesterday! Looking forward to another day of interesting talks. Link to poster below. (P.S. the children are 3–4 years old.)

Excited to present this poster today (w/ @gabriellavigliocco.bsky.social, @gretagandolfi.bsky.social, @fourtassi.bsky.social, and Yan Gu) at the 3rd International Workshop on Naturalistic Experimentation of Child Development at Birkbeck, University of London. Check out the poster here: osf.io/876ab

My first (physically) published book chapter. It's quite a weighty tome! Almost dropped it when the courier delivered it. Read the chapter here: academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

So excited to see the Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language come out!! Here is my chapter on Experimental approaches to sound symbolism: academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

It’s a fantastic chapter. I’ve been giving the preprint to students.

Four years(!) after the chapter was originally written, the official publication is now live (pre-print has been out for some time though): doi.org/10.1093/oxfo... How can plurality be expressed with iconic forms across different modalities of human languaging? #linguistics

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues! A thread 🧵

New work from the lab! A full multimodal picture of caregivers behaviours supporting learning in the early years answering the question: what do caregivers say and do to support their children’s word learning?

This is mandatory reading for all my students since it was uploaded to OSF. So glad it is finally out! \o/

Our paper (w/ @bodowinter.bsky.social and @mperlman.bsky.social) is finally out, officially 🥳. In it, we set ourselves the lofty goal of defining iconicity, focusing on its subjectivity, context-dependence, and gradability. Let us know if you agree with our definition? 🤔 doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

📆 ‼️ Workshop announcement ‼️ 14th Jan 2026 ⭐ Metaphorical Framings of Emotions in Mental Health ⭐ Organised by myself with Prof. Jeannette Littlemore Please see here for the full schedule and to sign up (in-person places are limited): lnkd.in/dZ57MKwt

New Preprint Alert 🚨 Excited to share our new work: “Caregivers’ multimodal actions scaffold word learning and vocabulary growth in the early years.” with Francesco Cabiddu, @eddonnellan.bsky.social, Yan Gu and @gabriellavigliocco.bsky.social. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

World Linguistics Day is on the 26th of November because that's de Saussure's birthday. It's a great opportunity to celebrate linguistics. If you want more linguistics in your feed, here's a linguistics starter pack from @gretchenmcc.bsky.social bsky.app/starter-pack... #WorldLinguisticsDay

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. 🚀