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

pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e... When you think about it, there a quite a few technologies that are kinda useful but just can’t be made to work economically- makes sense that “AI” would be in that category

I screen out Frontiers emails so hadn't seen a colleague's invite to their editorial board. so the colleague emailed me directly to ask again (we're friendly w/ each other) I don't like saying 'no' to service for good colleagues, but one must act on principle against bad publishers. here's my reply

Can I please waste a few moments of your time to complain about @ariessystems.bsky.social Editorial Manager. Because of the way it interacts with journals' own pages (it's always editorialmanager.com/nameofjournal), password managers assume the same username+password FOR EVERY BLOODY JOURNAL 1/5

📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

So, this study linking sweeteners to cognitive decline: 🚩 confuses correlation + causation 🚩 has no theory 🚩 shows evidence of p-hacking 🚩 reports inconsistent CIs / p-values 🚩 measures diet only once 🚩 has a big missing data problem 🚩 adjusts outcome opaquely www.theguardian.com/food/2025/se...

What a surprise! The AI overview completely misinterprets the findings of the study! Word order is LESS reliable than case-marking, not more. Read the correct version at psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

A good argument for using Effect Size and Confidence Intervals over p values. In some sense we already know as a field this is the right thing to do as it’s what we already (mainly) do for meta analysis www.facebook.com/share/p/19Sz...

Many updates to our psycholinguistic database page. You terrific people have been busy distributing open source data including lexical databases for BSL, French, German sign. LMK if I've missed anything www.reilly-coglab.com/data

My lab has an open post-doc position! We will begin reviewing applications as they come in. The post-doc will work with a vibrant research team at Penn State in the Department of Psychology and the Child Study Center. psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic... 1/3

Recently finished @rfkuang.bsky.social Babel, and Karen Hao’s @karenhao.bsky.social Empire of AI. Incredibly interesting parallels on the colonization of language/text. The people who make these technologies possible are considered disposable and get considerably less benefit than the creators.

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

Our position paper is now out: "Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE): A Global Framework for Measuring Children's Learning Variability Through Collaborative Data Sharing". srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) What is LEVANTE? 🧵

On top of everything else, it’s just so massively unnecessary- If sites want these things, actual experts on this stuff would be queuing up to write them for free!

Writing someone off as “evil” is an excuse to ignore the causes of human dysfunction, Amanda Knox writes. “That’s why I keep trying, even when I fail, to feel some degree of compassion for those labeled as ‘evil’”:

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

it's wild that R, the ubiquitous statistical computing language, was co-created by a Māori prof (Ross Ihaka) — and yet the vast majority of scientists who use R don't know this is like inventing the toaster. possibly the largest impact of a single member of an indigenous community on modern science

Are you working on issues of replication and reproducibility of methodological research in psychology? Consider submitting a proposal to my call for papers, happy to chat about your ideas or answer any questions! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

@ambridge.bsky.social is currently working on a ManyLanguages proposal on "Semantic Affectedness as a Universal of Passive Constructions”. Methodological details depend on the target languages, so Ben has asked us to help find experts. Get in touch with Ben if you would like to be involved 🤓

Nominative determinism strikes again (and for UK followers of a certain age, no, I don’t work on The Archers)

If you have the funds and the vision, please buy and restore the stunning Bernat Klein Studio, Galashiels - guide price £18,000. auctions.savills.co.uk/auctions/30-...

Excited to share this newly published paper on child-directed speech in the Ku Waru and Nungon languages of Papua New Guinea. Congratulations to Hannah Sarvasy, Alan Rumsey, Josua Dahmen, John Onga, and Stephanie Yam! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

The open access movement has been captured by the publishers, and the journal system is worse than ever. Suggestions like open review do nothing to make research or peer review better, nothing to break the bullshit of rewarding people for simply publishing, right or wrong. Where is our courage?

"Dear Academic. Would you like to spend a year putting together a special issue for our journal? You will provide us with all your contacts and edit the issue for us for free. We will then sell access to the work. In return for your efforts, you will be allowed to read the issue, for no extra cost".

Brilliant thread and replies here about how difficult it is to get messages across that contradict people's own views/biases. This resonates with my own experiences with practitioners and policy makers as well as general public. Referenced Guardian article here www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I’ve had lots of messages about my Guardian article, in which I argued we should stop universal mental health lessons in schools. The messages have fallen into three categories, and I’m reflecting on this here because I think it exposes something interesting in the field (and research in general) 🧵

Congratulations to Rhiannon Luyster, Taylor Boyd, Amelia Steele, Thuy Buonocore, Catherine Sancimino, and Sudha Arunchalam on the publication of their paper "Quality of remotely-collected gaze data in autistic and nonspectrum children" in LDR! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/6...