New interactive simulation in my online textbook illustrating publication bias in meta-analyses, and some techniques to model bias-adjusted effect sizes. None of these work perfectly. We need an unbiased literature to draw valid inferences. lakens.github.io/statistical_...

Does engaging with the arts help to slow the aging process? According to this new paper from Fancourt et al the answer is yes! Alas, the paper is actually unsuitable for such claims. Let’s examine by discussing how you'd establish whether arts engagement actually caused future health! 1/18 🧵

After years in preprint, our paper is finally out! We introduce LambdaG, a simple new authorship verification method that matches complex neural approaches. This supports the theory of grammar as a behavioural biometric (like a signature or gait). www.nature.com/articles/s41... #nlp #llm #forensic

To paraphrase Thomas Edison (or whoever actually said it) Statistical analysis is 1% Investigation and 99% Preparation. Most mistakes I see (and make!) result from rushing too quickly to model building!

This month’s #ManyLanguagesChallengeOfTheMonth comes from the world of **grammatical acceptability judgments** by the ML2 CLAPS team. @ambridge.bsky.social

Nominative determinism strikes again

Er du interessert i mysteriene bak det norske språket? Forskere ved Universitetet i Manchester gjennomfører en online undersøkelse som involverer å vurdere ord og setninger, med mål om å avdekke noen av disse mysteriene. Du vil motta finansiell kompensasjon for deltagelsen din. 1/2

Another @jstordaily.bsky.social popular-Psychology post lead-authored by one of my Psychology undergrads - here, Maliha Idow daily.jstor.org/face-value-c...

Most years, one or two of the students on my Psychology in the Real World course pitch a popular psychology blog post to @jstordaily.bsky.social - Here's the most recent, by Aabhya Parnami daily.jstor.org/love-is-blin...

The journal "Language Development Research" is now an official journal of the IASCL! LDR's intended audience is all researchers and professionals with an interest in language development and related fields. Read more on our website: www.childlanguage.org/ldr

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work. “If you do a power calculation it’s probably going to tell you that - for this between-subjects design- you’re gonna need like a minimum of 150 participants PER GROUP”

My latest book, about how we interpret real-life events using plots from movies, TV and novels, is now out in paperback: amzn.eu/d/0jiK7RoY. To celebrate, I talked about the book with my favourite writer Joel Golby on his podcast, Joel Golby's Book Club - shows.acast.com/joel-golbys-...

Good of Frontiers to send me a reminder to post my annual plea to my child language colleagues: DON’T SUBMIT TO OR REVIEW FOR FRONTIERS OR MDPI JOURNALS!

ManyLanguages is on two social platforms: ✨ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1107... ✨ Bluesky (this page): bsky.app/profile/many... Follow us to stay in the loop, join discussions, and help us spread the word about Big Team Science.

‘It is clearer than ever that recent claims [by the Bible Society] of a wide scale Christian revival, whether misinformation or disinformation, need to be retracted... everyone has the obligation to be rigorous in their presentation of data in the public realm and the claims they make for it.’

When setting up @langdevres.bsky.social I wrote into the rules that while special issues are welcome, all papers must be reviewed by a regular Action Editor - some people have been puzzled by that, but this is why it’s vital!

Sorry to blow my own trumpet here, but I've just added all 17 of our empirical studies of the acquisition of under-researched languages to the new @iasclchildlang.bsky.social repository. Huge thanks to all the PhDs/Postdocs/RAs/Collaborators who made them all possible! www.zotero.org/groups/60446...

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses. Here are some of the things we learned:

The recently accepted ManyLanguages project CLAPS - A Crosslinguistic Approach to Passive Semantics led by @ambridge.bsky.social is looking to fill four key leadership roles (Analysis Lead, Scaling Coordinator, Translation Coordinator, Ethics Coordinator). ⏰Deadline: 30th Jan.

I was surprised to see this as I’ve had reviewers strongly object when I’ve claimed in papers that LLMs store exemplars. So was I right all along? Or is there a sense in which what they’re doing isn’t quite “storing exemplars” per se? It certainly sounds like it!

It is unclear to me how much traction Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is getting on BlueSky. I am thinking of switching communication about new papers to LinkedIn, which gives better insight into the # of views garnered. Give us a like if you want Glossa to stay on the Blue side of things.

Verily, it’s a total mystery why this might be a more salient issue in the assortative mating process nowadays 🤔🧐🤷‍♂️

Is one of your goals for 2026 to write more? One question I get all the time is, "How do you make time to write?" So, here is my unsolicited writing advice for the new year:

Call it “mutual” and suddenly people get it.

What can 40 years of song lyrics tell us about society? I analysed the lyrics of 1,600 pop songs going back to 1985. Our music appears to be getting gloomier, less future-looking and more self-obsessed 1/6

Language Development Research, Volume 5, Issue 3 is now available for download on the LDR website. Thank you to all of our contributors! Wishing everyone a joyous New Year! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/101/in...

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

The United Kingdom is coming back to Erasmus+ 🇪🇺🇬🇧 We have concluded negotiations for the United Kingdom’s association to Erasmus+ in 2027, making further steps in our renewed EU-UK Strategic Partnership. More ↓ link.europa.eu/vf3vJk

If you value journalism, you have to pay for it. In the past, you would have bought a newspaper or a magazine. In the online world, you need to subscribe or it will eventually disappear under a tide of AI slop and adverts. @manchestermill.bsky.social is one of many local quality sources. Subscribe!

Language Development Research is now accepting submissions for a special issue on Multimodal Directive-Response Trajectories in Children's Language Socialization w/ Guest Editor: Alan Rumsey (Australian Nat'l Uni). Read more here: ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu & here: www.childlanguage.org/latestbulletin

Semantics and Statistics in the Formation of Causatives in Hijazi Arabic: Data From Semantic Ratings, Grammatical Acceptability Judgments and Computational Modeling. New in developmental psychology from Khadeejah Alaslani, Ronnie Wilbur, and @ambridge.bsky.social doi.org/10.1525/coll...

manchestermill.co.uk/lp-3/?referr... - really recommend subscribing to this - it’s a proper newspaper with investigative journalism and everything- no clickbait or churnalism!

Announcing publication of the full Special Issue of LDR on the Development of Metaphor. Thank you to Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Mary Beth Neff, PhD for organizing this volume and serving as Guest Editors! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/100/in...

EXCELLENT graphic on the drain of scientific publishing! zenodo.org/records/1759...

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Blows my mind how much people will spend on unproven health gimmicks but won’t get a proven vaccine

Hi everyone just another reminder/plea to give my band a spin on Spotify - for fans of Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Slowdrive and general guitar-based instrumental miserabilism! open.spotify.com/track/1fgpu3...

New release today for my post-rock instrumental band Advances in Mathematics open.spotify.com/track/1fgpu3...

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

This is an excellent point that generalizes. Researchers often defend suboptimal practices by referring to future studies with better designs. But: Why would anybody run those studies when you can just throw a bunch of variables into a regression and make sweeping "preliminary" claims?

Wild that this even needs saying! @evfedorenko.bsky.social @spiantado.bsky.social

And sorry to be that guy, but my book www.amazon.co.uk/Stories-Your... has a chapter on why nudges won’t work for climate change - they rely on a boring Sacrifice narrative - we need a thrilling Hero Saves The World one!!

In fact, the conclusion is clearer than the rather conservative title suggests. "No evidence" is what you say when your null effect is inconclusive. A Bayes Factor of 66 for the null would seem to constitute "Positive evidence for ineffectiveness...". Time to give up and try something stronger!

This really winds me up - vaccines, masks, air purification? Nah don’t bother - just get covid first then we’ll give you counselling

Was asked about collinearity again, so here's Vahove's 2019 post on why it isn't a problem that needs a solution. Design the model(s) to answer a formal question and free your mind janhove.github.io/posts/2019-0...

New paper! 🚨 I argue that LLMs represent a synthesis between distributed and symbolic approaches to language, because, when exposed to language, they develop highly symbolic representations and processing mechanisms in addition to distributed ones. arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

My research group ❤️. Reposts welcome - we’re looking for little scientists to come and help us research what makes them tick