📢 Announcing the First Workshop on Multilingual and Multicultural Evaluation (MME) at #EACL2026 🇲🇦 MME focuses on resources, metrics & methodologies for evaluating multilingual systems! multilingual-multicultural-evaluation.github.io 📅 Workshop Mar 24–29, 2026 🗓️ Submit by Dec 19, 2025

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪 Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

Thrilled to be heading to Suzhou with a big team of GroNLP'ers 🐮 Interested in Interpretable, Cognitively inspired, Low-resource LMs? Don't miss our posters & talks #EMNLP2025!

Another banger from @tallinzen.bsky.social . Also fits with some of the criticisms of Centaur and my faculty-based approach generally; if you want LLMs to model human cognition, give them more architecture akin to human faculty psychology like long and short-term memory. arxiv.org/abs/2510.05141

"A compelling and thought-provoking analysis of human sociality and the origins of language." The Interaction Engine by Stephen C. Levinson (@mpi-nl.bsky.social), Out Now & #OpenAccess https://cup.org/4nusznG #OA #Linguistics #LangSky 🐦🐦

Super proud of this work and very grateful for all the amazing people who provided valuable feedback along the way @remivantrijp.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @cedricboeckx.bsky.social @inbalarnon.bsky.social ❤️❤️❤️🙏

✨ #ILCB Summer School 2025 – Just a few days to go! ✨ From September 1–5, we’ll welcome students, researchers, and lecturers at CIRM, #Marseille for a week of courses, workshops, and discussions on #language, #brain & #cognition. Looking forward to a stimulating week of scientific exchanges!

🌞 Back from the summer break! We kick off the new season with an exciting ILCB Talk by Simon Kirby (University of Edinburgh): 🗓️ Sept 26, 2025 – Marseille 🎙️ “Cultural evolution creates language-like structure: from humans to humpback whales and beyond” 🔗 ilcb.fr/event/simon-kirby #ILCB

The first live session for our poster #CogSci2025 is happening right now on Teams: CogSci V3-P-41 Europe and Asia 1 august 2025 12:00 - 13:00 (GMT) teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-joi... @cogscisociety.bsky.social

Let me know if you don't have access via your institution and I can send you a copy personally ☺️

Just in time for the @cogscisociety.bsky.social conference and the Rumelhart 25th Anniversary Event, the 2023 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Nick Chater is out in TopiCS in Cognitive Science, edited by Mike Oaksford and me: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765... 🧵 1/3

How do our brains and bodies support social learning in real time? We take an ecological and multimodal neuroscience approach to study mutual prediction and social coordination when learning with others. It took 5 full years for this one! Full open-access pre-print: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am advertising 2 positions in language evolution with my group at ‪‪@dondersinst.bsky.social: 📢 Fully-funded PhD position (Robotics/AI 🤖) www.ru.nl/en/working-a... 📢 Postdoc position (Virtual Reality 🎮) www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Deadline for applications is August 14th. Please RT! :)

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 👇

Two nice papers now added to my primer of what to read about theory in cognitive science ... docs.google.com/document/d/1... 1/

SIGdial has three fantastic keynotes this year & registration is open! 🎉 "Are there purely multi-turn 'dialog failures'?" by Dr Chris Welty "Interactive Task Learning" by Prof Alex Lascarides "Ecological Study of Language Acquisition, the role of natural conversation" by @fourtassi.bsky.social

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

🚀 I’m excited to announce the launch of our new research chair DevAI&Speech (2025–2029), funded by the Grenoble AI Institute MIAI Cluster IA! The project explores how human developmental processes can inspire more grounded and socially aware conversational AI (1/6).

Applications are due July 15! Spread the word 🤓🙏🏻

👏 Congratulations to Christian-G. Bénar, recipient of a 2024 ERC Advanced Grant! He was awarded for his project OptiMEG: non-invasive recording of deep brain activity using mobile sensors optimized with intracerebral measures. www.linkedin.com/posts/inserm... #ERC #AdvancedGrant #amU #INS

Constructing language: A framework for explaining acquisition. New paper published by @carorowland.bsky.social‬ et al. doi.org/10.1016/j.ti....

I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Join us for this interesting discussion today! I'll contribute to the conversation on automating meaning contingency by combining methods for communicative intent tagging (e.g., question–response pairs) with tools for quantifying coherence in dialogue

The @interspeech.bsky.social early registration deadline is coming up in a few days! Want to learn how to analyze the inner workings of speech processing models? 🔍 Check out the programme for our tutorial: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter... & sign up through the conference registration form!

The first paper that discovered the spectral structure in whale codas is available here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Don't miss our next ICIS webinar! June 19 2025. Join leading researchers for a deep dive into cutting-edge work in infancy research. infantstudies.org/icis-online-... #InfantResearch #InfantStudies

Cross-posting the abstracts for two talks I'm giving next week! This one on formal languages for LLM pretraining and evaluation, at Apple ML Research in Copenhagen on Wednesday

Following the success story of BabyBERTa, I & many other NLPers have turned to language acquisition for inspiration. In this new paper we show that using Child-Directed Language as training data is unfortunately *not* beneficial for syntax learning, at least not in the traditional LM training regime

“Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models” I’m happy to share that the preprint of my first PhD project is now online! 🎊 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.23689

🚨Job offer🚨 PhD position on my #ERC grant 'LaDy' to study how we process language in the dyad using interactive paradigms and EEG hyper-scanning. Info and application link here (correction: application deadline is 11/07): emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Docto... @cnrs-dr12.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu

New preprint out! 👇 We adapt the ABX task, commonly used in speech models, to investigate how multilingual text models represent form (language) vs content (meaning). 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17747 🙌 With Jie Chi, Skyler Seto, @maartjeterhoeve.bsky.social, Masha Fedzechkina & Natalie Schluter

Feature attribution is always tricky. We show just how tricky it is for speech models.

🎓⏰ Last call! Only a few hours left to apply for the ILCB Summer School 2025 in Aix-Marseille (Sept 1–5)! Join researchers from around the world to explore the mind & brain through lectures, courses, and discussions. Apply now 👉 columbo.univ-amu.fr/index.php/53... #Neuro #Ling #PhD #Postdoc

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖 Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths? Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

"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...

We're still accepting apps for our research scientist position with LEVANTE (levante-network.org). This position is ideal for folks wanting to be the interface between a cool scientific project and an awesome team of software developers. Think of it as a technical product manager, but for science!

Word learning is usually about what a word does refer to. But can toddlers learn from what it doesn’t? Our new Cognition paper shows 20-month-olds use negative evidence to infer novel word meanings, reshaping theories of language development. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share a new preprint w/ @michael-lepori.bsky.social & Michael Franke! A dominant approach in AI/cogsci uses *outputs* from AI models (eg logprobs) to predict human behavior. But how does model *processing* (across layers in a forward pass) relate to human real-time processing? 👇 (1/12)

really cool paper by @vkempe.bsky.social tracking child directed (well, broadcasted) speech over several decades to assess cultural variability of cds acoustic features: eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.50... I suspect vowel space area might also have changed?

Excited to share the DIMS Dashboard—a tool for displaying multimodal, extracted time series alongside the original video source! It’s designed to support and inspire a richer qualitative–quantitative research cycle. Huge thanks to my amazing collaborators and mentors who made this possible! 🙌

NEW PREPRINT Iconic gestures are produced before the associated words and support prediction, but how does this work in children learning words? Check out our new paper led by @marinewang.bsky.social @eddonnellan.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

FYI, this year’s program includes deep dives into state-of-the-art research. E.g., if you’re curious about AI and language development, my course offers a hands-on intro using text, visual, and speech AI trained on child-directed input to study learnability in syntax, phonology, and semantics !

Excited to share a new paper I collaborated on during my research stay at the University of Heidelberg! A systematic review of (semi-)automatic tools for studying early speech and language development! Read it here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

How do we build theory in cogsci? traditional physics w its rich data and experimental possibilities is often used as parangon. We argue historical sciences provide an equally rich source: "Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect": doi.org/10.1007/s421... 🧵 1/

Applications are now OPEN for 15 PhD fellowships in the Doctoral Programme in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at CIMeC, University of Trento, Italy! 📅 Deadline: June 5, 2025 🧠 Research mind, brain & behavior ℹ More info 🔗 phd.unitn.it/drcimec 🔗 www.unitn.it/en/phd/cognitive-and-brain-sciences

🎤 Join the TALEP team for Benoît Favre’s talk: “What Do Multimodal Tokenizers Understand About Conversation?” 🗓 May 13, 10 AM 📍 FRUMAM, Saint-Charles campus #AI #Multimodal #NLP #ConversationAnalysis #CognitiveScience #LIS— don’t miss it!

I am delighted to give a workshop on ultrasound imaging at STEM IX. If you are a student in lgage sc, psychology, cog sc, STEM is a great opportunity to develop applied knowledge about empirical methods to study speech, lgage & behaviour. 📅 July, 14-18, 2025. labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/summerschool...

One week left to apply! Re current events: Theoretically this could also be a postdoc position - get in touch if you are interested.

We're looking for a PhD student interested in developing brains and developing new methods to study them! Anna Kowalczyk and myself have a fully funded PhD position to advance OPM-MEG methods for infant and neonatal brain imaging. 👉 Please repost to help us spread the word 🙏 More info & links 👇