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

Can’t spell Spirit without RIP 🙏

Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>

hmm

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Anyone know if workshop keynotes can register in phase one for ACL 2026?

Seems from the CFP page that this (pre-selecting commit) is just about EMNLP, and not AACL, unless otherwise announced by AACL)

🚀 Announcing the Chinese BabyLM Challenge: the first shared task on data-efficient pretraining for Chinese. 📍 Co-located with NLPCC 2026 (Nov 3–5, Macau🇨🇳🇲🇴) Can you train a strong Chinese LM on just ~100M words? chinese-babylm.github.io 🧵 👇(1/6)

Fun new collab coming out in TICS (w/ Haley Weaver & Sudha Arunachalam) digging into the assumptions underlying the use of eye-gaze methods to study vocabulary development. Working on this paper really got us thinking - we hope it does the same for our readers! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Introducing Datapages, a new project from Mika Braginsky and me. Datapages are open-source templates for creating interactive websites that make research datasets easy to find, explore, and reuse. No coding required for the basic setup. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/data...

Announcing a new version of our 2024 paper on linguistic hypothesis generation from LMs! @najoung.bsky.social and I have systematized our hypothesis generation framework, added stringent criteria for model selection, 10x-ed our learning trials, and included an epigraph from Jeff Elman 🙏!

Perhaps more ink has been spilled on the topic of Island Constraints than any other such phenomenon in theoretical linguistics. In new work with @kmahowald, we study how LMs process such phenomenon, using techniques from mechanistic interpretability to guide our exploration. 🧵👇

The Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford (cogtoolslab.github.io) is recruiting two new research staff members to join in AY 26-27. Full-Time Lab Manager: forms.gle/UVwfx5wbY9Km.... IRiSS Predoc Researcher: iriss.stanford.edu/predoc/2026-.... Please share widely in your networks, thank you!!

Some bears will appear in ACL Findings this year! Congrats to Sriram and Siyuan for their hard work -- I am excited about this paper for two main reasons: 1) I got to express a little bit about what I think about language and thought; 2) this was one of the smoothest projects i've worked on!

To appear in ACL 2026 main -- congrats to Tianyang on her first PhD project! Check out our preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 to understand the interplay between representations from language (alone) vs. from extra-linguistic input (for category membership)

Slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because (a) There was cilantro in the soup *and* (b) Amy is allergic to cilantro Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Met so many people (old friends and new) in person for the first time + it was such an amazing time at both Groningen and UvA!

Excited to visit @gronlp.bsky.social (April 1) and @amsterdamnlp.bsky.social (April 2) to present a talk on something I have been thinking together with @najoung.bsky.social for the past 3 years!

he‘s not wrong… 🤷‍♂️http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu/papers/lupyan_bergen_2015.pdf

Have three posters with my awesome collaborators today at #hsp2026! Read on more and come to the posters to talk about the importance of neutral baselines in priming, the need to model uncertainty in meaning in RSA, and the dissociation of prediction and structural processing in eye-tracking!

New paper with @coryshain.bsky.social: We develop "perturbation" - a simple approach to finding shared representations (common abstractions) in LMs. We perturb an LM by fine-tuning it on a single adversarial example and measure how this perturbation “infects” other examples.

Heading to #EACL2026! 🇲🇦 Friday 11a Poster Session 6: LMs struggle to perform inferences around discourse connectives aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-lo... Sunday 5p TeachingNLP workshop: new course on discourse+generation aclanthology.org/2026.teachin... w/ @kanishka.bsky.social + Daniel Brubaker

Woohoo Grusha is here! Follow her!!!

Excited for #EACL2026 in Morocco! I will be there alongside @jessyjli.bsky.social and Daniel Brubaker (UT undergrad) Daniel will present Wugnectives (arxiv.org/abs/2510.09556) on Friday (11am posters) I will present work with @sangheekim.bsky.social (arxiv.org/abs/2510.12740) the same time! 1/2

A new paper from @yuyan0m.bsky.social on how children acquire the meaning of the word "zero". Tl/dr: It ain't nothing.

⚛️ Introducing CREATE, a benchmark for creative associative reasoning in LLMs. Making novel, meaningful connections is key for scientific & creative works. We objectively measure how well LLMs can do this. 🧵👇

Martin = one of the kindest people I know! Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of the best in their field!

I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

What is the interplay between representations learned from (language) surface forms alone, and those learned from more grounded evidence (e.g.,vision)? Excited to share new work understanding “Cross-modal taxonomic generalization” in (V)LMs arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 1/