An international women’s day message from my friend and partner in activism Sandi Toksvig #iwd #internationalwomensday

Abstracts open for MPAL 2026! 28–30 Oct 2026 | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen + online 🗓 Submit by 15 May 2026 (midnight, anywhere). Theme: variation in child language acquisition. Join us, more info: www.mpi.nl/news/abstrac...

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

New open-access paper with @asliozyurek.bsky.social & Emanuela Campisi We extend relevance theory to a multimodal view of language, demonstrating that speakers explicitly highlight iconic gestures as communicatively relevant in knowledge transmission context 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

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Netherlands joins the 'Universities Shooting Themselves In the Foot to Placate Populists' Club.

No woman I know in academia would be surprised by this, but its good to see it documented like this, I guess.

Some news: After 10 years as a Senior Lecturer, this is my last day of work in UK academia. I will start a new position as Lab Manager in the Multimodal Language Dept at @mpi-nl.bsky.social in February. I am delighted to be back at the MPI and to work with @asliozyurek.bsky.social again! 😊 1/

Our new paper in Cognitive Science, led by Can! @canavci.bsky.social "Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures" Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @kudilvebilis.bsky.social

Autistic adults, regardless of whether clinically dx or self-identifying, report more difficulty processing auditory information, particularly others' speech. doi.org/10.1177/1362... New research by Elena Silva, Linda Drivers @lindadrijvers.bsky.social and myself (reposting with correct link)

🤯 Wild shit here. They put biologgers on greater noctule bats and found them pursuing, capturing, and eating birds in-flight. The recording of a European Robin getting blasted and snacked on is nuts. Sci Am story: www.scientificamerican.com/article/this... Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

happy to share our new paper, out now in Neuron! led by the incredible Yizhen Zhang, we explore how the brain segments continuous speech into word-forms and uses adaptive dynamics to code for relative time - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

It shouldn't take an FOI request to see grant success rates. UKRI has a duty of care to researchers to supply this from the outset. We are judged, compared, promoted (or not) according to unbelievably bad odds.

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Analyzing the academic trajectories of 78,216 psychology researchers, we demonstrate a persistent gender attrition gap, with women psychologists dropping out of academia at consistently higher rates than men psychologists. Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13273

Also, if you're "in bed with flu", it's almost certainly Covid.

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft: Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵 1/

We're seeking the next Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics! Lead cutting-edge research in language & cognition. Nominations (incl. self) due 19 Dec 2025. mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/nominations-and-self-nominations-sought-position-director-max

Hate seeks to divide us. But hope endures when we stand together. Our solidarity is with the Jewish community today. #britainstandstogether

an extraordinary person with an extraordinary legacy who nevertheless didn’t take herself too seriously when Gary Larson published this cartoon, she was in Africa and her institute was horribly offended and drafted a complaint the whole thing was defused when she returned - she found it funny

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵

Just fuck off with this. How about start the conversation by highlighting how much immigrants contribute to the UK - not least by propping up the NHS and social care system! Also - forced volunteering is not volunteering, it's unpaid labour.

Very much enjoying the culture of trust and respect implicit in the installation of room usage monitoring devices on academics' office doors today. Imagine my shock on discovering that managers' doors remain unsullied…

I wrote something about feeling like a guest in a country that is my home. bestforbritain.substack.com/p/my-place-o...

Absolutely astounded that the UCU and Unison branches at Kent and Greenwich were not consulted, and that staff only found out about the merger this morning via BBC news and Kent Online. Solidarity to all colleagues.

Why does a speech pause make us doubt, but a hand gesture make us sure? 🤔🧠 Find the answer on the @cogscisociety.bsky.social blog! cognitivesciencesociety.org/why-does-a-s... w/ @reyhanfurman.bsky.social, @tilbegoksun.bsky.social, and Terry Eskenazi @kudilvebilis.bsky.social

Another highly cited classic finding fails to replicate

Gerbrand, Wengman & Forssman (2025) found that eye-tracking, especially the preferential looking paradigm, can offer an objective complement to parental reports for predicting children’s early vocabulary development. #DevPsySky #PsychSciSky #EyeTracking #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

In which M&S decides it no longer wants my business, and is probably going to commit discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment in the process. www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/18/m...

I have known no peace since I went around The Netherlands by train, where the fare from Station A to Station B is exactly the same price any time of day whether you need to travelling right now or are booking ahead months from now. And you can bloop it all on contactless. Imagine. IMAGINE!

Well done everyone, you've built the worst of all possible worlds! Despite being told exactly what would happen at every stage. You'll have to raise fees *and* degrade quality *and* close some institutions. Superb stuff, 10/10, no notes. 👏👏👏👏

Holy shit. And all the more embarrassing from a place with such a stellar linguistics department

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? 🧵

In today's adventure on Editorial Manager, me trying to log in to my account... 🤦‍♀️

ChatGPT talks to adults like it’s grooming them. Ohhhh wowwwww you’re so mature for your age. Nobody understands you.

All 15 kgs of the grumpiest little missy Kahlua have been added. Participation tax gladly attached 🐶😊

every single woman I've brought it up with at some point has been sexually assaulted before, myself included, and not a single one of these men has ever cared about the reality of that, but now it's maybe looking like some black and brown men are moving to Britain and oh, suddenly women are people?

They’ve got no fcking idea. Signed, a Turk.

HEPI estimates that if 6% international student levy goes forward, it will cost UCL £42 million per annum, University of Manchester £27 million and KCL £22 million. Great way to support the sector in a crisis (45.2% of HEIs now forecasting a deficit). Not. HEPI link: www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/08/08/t...

Here are the 10 most common recorded cockatoo dance movements (illustrations by Zenna Lugosi). 🧪 🦜 #birds #dancing #animalbehaviour #science #parrots #cockatoos Full paper it comes from is here: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

What a fantastic new paper out today in @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... - and what a great resource, summarising the climatic niche of primates and tackling the hypothesis on whether primates evolved in warm tropical forests 😍

An open letter to M&S that people can sign openletter.earth/an-appeal-to...

The moment I saw that "trans bra" M & S story I sensed it was nonsense. Seconds later, having read the Telegraph piece I knew it was worse than that. It was deliberate hate mongering completely devoid of evidence, names and facts. Superb job of debunking it here www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/06/m...

The Linguistics Discipline at La Trobe University have developed a discipline-specific position statement on the role of generative AI in our classrooms. www.superlinguo.com/post/7908973...

My master’s thesis is published in Cognitive Science! ✨🎉 Here is the summary of our results👇🏼

Do the disfluencies and gestures we produce when we speak act as metacognitive cues? Our new paper is out now to answer this question! Great work led by Begüm Yılmaz @begumyilmaz.bsky.social 👐💬 #CogPsych #PsychSciSky