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

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? 🧵