💬 Languages are diverse: thousands are spoken worldwide, and they differ widely in the structures they use. 🧬 Human DNA variation preserves the history of populations and individuals. 🤝 Are these two dimensions of human diversity related? 🔗 evolvinglanguage.ch/isolated-hum...

Very happy this is out! @markstoneking.bsky.social and I tried to test this correlation 20 years ago but didn’t have enough data. Now this has become possible thanks to new databases and fantastic work by lead author @annagraff.bsky.social and an absolutely wonderful team!

The Department of Basic Neurosciences of the Faculté de médecine - UNIGE and the NCCR Evolving Language are looking for an Assistant Professor with Tenure Track or Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience. Apply before May 26th! Full details here: jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta...

I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere! www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

With @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @annagraff.bsky.social @balthasarbickel.bsky.social @kkshimizu1.bsky.social Damián E. Blasi, Erik J. Ringen, Vladimir Bajić, Daphné Bavelier, and Brigitte Pakendorf.

Our paper is out! We linked genetic and linguistic data to study how contact changes language and found consistent patterns of borrowing across contact situations @balthasarbickel.bsky.social @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social @isle-uzh.bsky.social doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv7521

Exciting new opening @nccrlanguage.bsky.social with the option of permanent extension. If you work in cutting-edge stats and are interested in joining a highly inter-disciplinary, vibrant community, don't hesitate to apply at tinyurl.com/3fxwjk8e

📰 A team of researchers from the University of Neuchâtel studied the ability to associate a new sound with an object. This cognitive faculty of rapid association was already attested in humans, but what about apes, our closest relatives? evolvinglanguage.ch/associating-...

📢 Registrations are now open for the X-PPL Workshop 2025! Held by the @isle-uzh.bsky.social in Zurich on the 1st and 2nd of September.

Very interesting @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social study by @sabinestoll.bsky.social @balthasarbickel.bsky.social & colleagues @nccrlanguage.bsky.social arguing that increased vocal accommodation (as a sign of homophily) facilitated the evolution of vocal production learning in the hominin lineage 🧪

🎉 Registration is open for the Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing & Learning Workshop 2025! Join us in Zurich (01–02.09.) for keynotes by Sudha Arunachalam & Lars Meyer, plus other exciting talks & posters. Register: www.ema.uzh.ch/R7EPE #XPPL2025 #LanguageDiversity #CogSci #UZH

Brilliant case of the @nccrlanguage.bsky.social spirit of team science. Congratulations on a major achievement!

How do children learn to negate with diverse linguistic and cultural background? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper on the role of peers in language acquisition: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Very happy to share a new preprint, written with people I have learned a lot from: Paola Cerrito, Carel van Schaik, Judith Burkart, Anne-Lise Giraud (@neurospeech.bsky.social), Daphne Baverlier, @balthasarbickel.bsky.social: how the communication system of neanderthals may have differed from ours 🧪🧵

Delighted to announce the publication of a collaborative effort, co-led by @limorraviv.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social, showcasing the ways in which researchers have made language evolution an empirical issue: A handbook of experimental approaches to the fascinating problem of language evolution 🧪

Submit an abstract 📝 on your work on cross-linguistic aspects of language processing and (first) language acquisition to ⭐️Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL) 2025⭐️ (Sept 1&2 @ U Zurich)! It’s a fantastic venue to present work on how ling diversity 🌏 & the mind/🧠 interact!

Happy to share a PhD opportunity in my new lab at the University of Zurich! Application deadline: June 30. Do not hesitate to contact me for any questions!

Sind Sie deutschsprachig mit wenigen Französischkenntnisse? Dann nehmen Sie an einer wissenschaftlichen Online-Studie über Sprache von @nocelab.bsky.social teil und helfen Sie dabei, den Einfluss der Sprache auf die Kognition zu verstehen.

📰 In the current issue of Open Mind @mitpress.bsky.social, you can find two #articles from NCCR members on #hominin #cognition and perception of events, and #language #acquisition in children 👇

Great to see this out! Congratulations to lead author Aitor Egurtzegi and the whole team!

And yet another piece of evidence for the primate roots of human event role cognition! Congratulations to lead author @sarahbrocard.bsky.social

‼️ PhD opportunity: join a vibrant community working on language evolution @nccrlanguage.bsky.social @isle-uzh.bsky.social please spread widely www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/phd-...

Our next ISLE Colloquium will be from Anna Graff (Uni Zurich), on "What population genetics can tell us about the impact of contact and isolation on structural linguistic diversity" Tues 29 April 4:15pm UZH Oerlikon, room AFL-F-121 www.isle.uzh.ch/en/staff/gra...

📢 Submissions are open for the Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning Workshop 2025! @isle-uzh.bsky.social

Paola Cerrito, who is starting her own Hominin Evolution Group at the University of Zürich, has just opened a great PhD position. Fantastic opportunity for someone interested in human life history evolution. I am lucky to collaborate with Paola. She is a terrific scholar @nccrlanguage.bsky.social

I'm hiring! 2 x PhDs and 1 x PostDoc, to work with me at Uni Zurich on a project investigating how semantic patterns differ by geographic region. Linguistic typology, data science, spatial analysis, phylogenetic methods, potential fieldwork... REPOST 🙏 www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/jobs.html

We also wrote a lay article in @theconversation.com about our latest research on bonobo vocal communication! theconversation.com/bonobos-crea...

🚨New in @science.org🚨 With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

📢 #Job alert ! We are looking for an #administrative assistant for our consortium, at the University of Zurich - an exciting substitute position with varied tasks, nice colleagues and a great insight into university operations! More information below 👇 jobs.uzh.ch/offene-stell...

Fantastic job opportunity: Join our community of researchers spanning the natural, social, and cognitive sciences in studying the evolution of language in all its dimensions!

🆕 📝 𝑵𝒆𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒄𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒂𝒅𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒏 #EEG evidence that development of top-down #language processing skills is ongoing by age 6 b/c #Basque children‘s and adults’ 🧠 signatures of processing case marking differ in the β-band. OA here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

But we can do something! If you also work on language processing or first language acquisition focussing on cross-linguistic variation, then submit an abstract to *Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2025* #X_PPL2025! Call for abstracts: easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/X...

Wow! "An Agent-First Preference in a Patient-First Language During Sentence Comprehension", in which we report the first-ever language processing #EEG study on an Austronesian language, is among the 10 most-cited articles in Cognitive Science in 2023! 🧵1/ #TopCitedArticle doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

Job: Postdoctoral Researcher in Indo-European Studies 70 - 80 % (Universität Zürich) jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... #linguistics #pie #indoeuropean #anatolian #historicallinguistics #langsky

Confs: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2025 (Switzerland): Meeting Description: The Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning Workshop (X-PPL) brings together the growing community of researchers working to expand the diversity of languages in the scope of…

Ever worried about nonindependence and empty cells in linguistic typological databases? Our solution is out in Sci Data at doi.org/10.1038/s415...

📣The @isle-uzh.bsky.social is now an official institute of the University of Zurich. Its mission is to deepen interdisciplinary research in the field of language evolution. The ISLE also serves as the host institution of the NCCR Evolving Language. More info⬇️ evolvinglanguage.ch/an-institute...

Today marks a milestone for our #NCCRevolvingLanguage work! Our #openscience language dataset by Alessandra Rampinini, @irenebalboni.bsky.social , @olgakepinska.bsky.social , Raphael Berthele and @nargolestani.bsky.social is out in #SpringerNature #ScientificData 🧠 😍 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Shimizu group seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher in population genomics at the University of Zurich to study genetic and language evolution. Applications are open now. More info: https://jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancies/postdoc-in-population-genomics/40227b73-2360-4e79-8924-844e5f5ed4c0 #postdoc

🧑‍🎓Starting from Fall Semester 2025, the UZH will offer a #Master’s program in Evolutionary Language Science, an interfaculty program jointly offered by the Fac. of Arts and Social Sciences and the Fac. of Science. More information on their website⬇️ www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/studying-...

This December, the incredible identity, progress, and advancements of our NCCR collaborators during this past year will be showcased, one post at a time for every day of December. Follow this adventure on Instagram: www.instagram.com/nccr_language/

In our new paper 📝 @plos.bsky.social PLOS Biology, we use #eyetracking to study how great apes understand who-does-what-to-whom — surprisingly similar to human adults! Thus suggests that the event cognition basis for language was present in our common ancestor. ➡️ journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

We, that is Catalina Torres, Marie-Ann Morand, @balthasarbickel.bsky.social and me. 🧵

Hot off the press! Is there a pre-linguistic basis for event role attribution? In our new paper out in PLoS Biology, we take a comparative eye tracking approach to explore temporal gaze distribution to agents and patients in dyadic interactions tinyurl.com/mryk7kmb

To rewatch the presentation, you can follow the link below! www.youtube.com/live/mPlhODk...

"Disentangling contact and inheritance in lexical semantics" 📣LAST CALL for abstracts for this workshop, proposed for SLE 2025 ...in Bordeaux!🍷 societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/work...

📣 Job alert! Postdoc with the NCCR Evolving Language @nccrlanguage.bsky.social , focusing on cross-cultural and cross-linguistic diversity in language processing, to collaborate with neuro-imaging experts. Details here: www.ivs.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

📰🐒Marmoset monkeys can combine their calls into sequences, with hierarchical rules! Learn more in the new #article on our website, based on the recently published research of A. Bosshard, S. Townsend & B. Bickel @isle-uzh.bsky.social ! In EN, FR and DE. evolvinglanguage.ch/decoding-the...

What kind of evolution is "language evolution"? How is it (un)like biological or technological evolution? get the answers in this BiG Picture article by @balthasarbickel.bsky.social et al www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...