How do children learn new words? Do they simply track word-object co-occurrences across contexts, or do they also use information about what speakers know and intend? With @mzettersten.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, I tackled this question in our new preprint! 1/🧵👇 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited that our paper on minimal translation pairs for ASL was recognized with a best paper award at the Workshop on Generative AI for Sign Language @ CVPR 2026! Congrats to my co-authors @skarabuklu.bsky.social, Shester, Diane, Greg, and Karen! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.27232

“Whoever loses this is going to be dejected and absolutely irate” — amazing commentary 🙏

clauding my way to a functional minicons documentation website!

How does knowledge learned from language alone interact with that learned from extra-linguistic modalities? Come find out our case study on cross modal generalization of semantic categories @ Coronado, poster C2, 11-12:30!! #ACL2026

Adele is too kind to attribute this to me but this really comes from her own 1995 constructions book, as well as John Beavers’ work and Beth Levin’s papers!

Doing my first ever conf-workshop keynote at the computational developmental linguistics workshop (comp-dev-ling.github.io)! Come one, come all!

The full BBS treatment from me and @futrell.bsky.social on "How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the LMs" is now out, with all the commentaries and our response. If you "Save PDF", it will give you the whole target article + commentary + response pdf: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Check out our #ACL2026 Oral paper 🗣️🤖 How do MLMs ground word usage through interactions with the physical and social world? Taking a classical human communication paradigm, we compare 7 MLMs with humans. doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.84

First the US has to play two teams in the same game, then they drop to 10 men! Terrible!

🐸 New position paper on compositionality! 🐸 I synthesize my thoughts about the proper role/interpretation of behavior and mechanism in asking the question "Is this system (mind or machine) exhibiting compositionality?"

Come join @lindiatjuatja.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social, @jessyjli.bsky.social, and me at UT Linguistics! Lindia and I will be around at ACL in SD, and Kyle and Jessy will be with us in spirit!🤘 My lab: kanishka.website/lab/

I will be at #ACL2026 from July 2--7! I will be giving a keynote at CDL workshop on controlled rearing and hypothesis generation from language models! Tianyang Xu (first author) and I will present work on cross-modal generalization in VLMs on July 7! Paper: aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...

A brief history of Open Mind 2013: Dick Aslin was disillusioned with Cognition (Elsevier). Nick Lindsay (MIT Press) wanted to create an open access cognitive science journal Nick contacted Dick, and Open Mind started. Editorial, February 2017, issue 1 of Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Finally out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. Everything I think I know about word meanings. Particular focus on words that are unfamiliar or ambiguous. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Where did the "0-Eng-UK-MOR.zip" go from the talkbank website? can't access it anymor!

🦁 🦁

My list on what to read about theory-driven cognitive science has now been updated to add a few more thoughts and references about the role of AI as 'in silico' models of human cognition. Your comments welcome - please add to the googledoc. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Can a grammar book replace training data for AI translation? NYU Linguistics PhD student Jackson Petty (@jacksonpetty.org), CDS Assoc. Prof. Tal Linzen (@tallinzen.bsky.social), and CDS MS student Jaulie Goe tested this with synthetic languages. nyudatascience.medium.com/can-ai-learn...

This fox sports World Cup commentary is so boring — it’s like listening to two people talk over something mundane. Case in point: Cape Verde just scored a wonder goal against Uruguay and the commentators were like “hmm yes a goal”

Been reviewing for OM since 2023 and have enjoyed reading every single submission so far!

No priming was observed today:

UT Linguistics is hiring a temporary faculty member at the rank of Assistant Professor of Instruction whose work is on semantics! See the following link for more details: apply.interfolio.com/187891.

UT Austin Linguistics is looking for an Assistant Professor of Instruction with a focus on semantics! 2-2 load, great office, great colleagues! apply.interfolio.com/187891

A little bit of wugology to test LLM pharmacology (linguistics meets medicine?) Check out @kaijie-mo.bsky.social’s tour de force effort in leading this project from a casual idea thrown around during a chat to a proper manuscript!

🪩Meta is hosting a networking event at ACL'26🪩 Learn more here: aclnetworkingevent2026.splashthat.com

Computational people are not oblivious to this, for example @kanishka.bsky.social gave an awesome keynote with a super cool slide (I forgot to sneak a picture 🥲) on the (envisioned) relationship between machine cog sci and human cog sci. 5/n

Since last week's (totally awesome btw) ICCG14 in Princeton, I can't stop thinking about LMs and linguistics. I know this topic has been discussed to death, so pls bear with me (long thread incoming). 1/n

Wrote today's NYT crossword - enjoy!

Excited to present at ICCG14, check out the program for a lot of cool works by a lot of cool people: iccg14.oa-event.com/program

New minimal pair analysis dataset, this time for American sign-language! Also has a bit of controlled rearing work using the SHuBERT model! (It’s minimal in the translation and not video, so there’s still lots to do!)

New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

we live in a world where if you search for "x ai" but have a typo in "x" it still returns a valid ai company 🙏

The NYT published a cool piece on crossword art that quotes me and my work! www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/c...

Standard RSA often assumes that speakers are certain about the meaning they intend to communicate, but this assumption need not always be true! In paper with @grushaprasad.bsky.social and @carolynanderson.bsky.social, we propose a method (um-RSA) to incorporate meaning uncertainty within RSA

Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Interested in analyzing 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗱-𝗔𝗱𝘂𝗹𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 with computational tools? Then the 𝗖𝗔𝗜𝗧 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗸𝗶𝘁 🪁 (pronounced [kaIt]) might be just what you’re looking for! It includes a brand-new i𝗻-𝗱𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗿, 𝗣𝗢𝗦 𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿, and 𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲-𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿.

Finally, from phil of science: no single hypothesis can be falsified independently. A failed prediction might be due to your theory, or might be your operationalization, or your sample, or your stimuli. This is "holism" — and it's why a single failed study rarely settles a theoretical debate.

🤖🧠 New commentary 🧠🤖 What role should large language models (LLMs) play in linguistics? I reflect on this question in a commentary now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10061 To appear in BBS as a commentary on @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social's excellent piece on LLMs & Linguistics!

"Government fbyorf the people shall not perish from the earth" - Abraham Lincoln

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990

Can't wait for this conference! Register now! iccg14.oa-event.com

Inspiring work!

In our latest paper on how multimodal interaction supports language acquisition, Zhang, Dong et al use head mounted eyetracking technology to demonstrate (!) the role of demonstratives (this/that) in helping children identify the correct referent in a complex visual scene osf.io/preprints/ps...

I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.

We recently taught a methods course supported by Experimentology + various primary readings. Experimentology was a truly fantastic resource! psych-methods.netlify.app

New opinion piece on the interface between research on concepts and categories in minds vs. in neural network LMs! I take the position that there is much to be learned from this interface (e.g., learning about concepts from language alone) and outline some directions for future.

"She'll go to France or Spain or Germany or France" sounds redundant—unless licensed with context like "She will go to an art program in France or Spain or a math program in Germany or France" In new work w/ @qyao.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social: an LM-based 'Neural Semantics' account 🧵👇

New paper with @danieldrucker.bsky.social! We had language models play The Counterexample Game, a philosopher's pastime where one person proposes a conceptual analysis , another pokes holes in it, and the first one tries to repair it. What happens over long iterated chains? arxiv.org/abs/2605.03936