„Find a political home, be it a nonprofit, mutual aid group, or a community garden, so you have a network of people you want to be with as things get harder.”

PhD on *interactional and neural processes in conversation*, to work with the delightful Prof Adrian Bangerter in the charming Swiss city of Neuchatel... www.unine.ch/ipto/emploi/

the dysfunctional search function in Microsoft Outlook is an international scandal

Last night I dreamt that our students started forming these radical political groups called „Noun Phrases“ and the uni management was really angry

Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features. Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

ok I got curious and tried vibe coding for processing some cross-linguistic data... hilariously bad 😭 ... maybe a special case because I was dealing with GRAMMATICAL GENDER (AI was triggered), but it sure did produce some garbage

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

Congratulations to Alexandra Bosshard for winning the #SLE2025 award for best presentation by a post-doctoral researcher with her excellent talk on processing perspectives in animal compositionality!

Punctuated equilibrium, a concept introduced by paleontologists in 1972, reimagines evolution’s tempo as a stochastic burst rather than a steady beat. A new model finds support for their theory in both molecular and fossil data. @jakebuehler.bsky.social reports www.quantamagazine.org/the-sudden-s...

The Guardian just revealed Israel’s own military data: 83% of those killed in Gaza are civilians. That’s not war, that’s genocide.

"Evolutionary dynamics of language: Insights from a diverse sample of sociolinguistic studies" forthcoming article comparing findings from phylogenetic and sociolinguistic studies ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008...

I'm gonna start using the word "hereby" more often seems powerful

So happy that this paper lead by Joseph Mine is finally out! Was cool to be part of this project on the social learning of multi-modal communication in chimpanzees, which is slightly outside of my usual scope (and it’s my first co-authored paper too, yay!) :) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The Israeli army just murdered Anas Al-Sharif a Palestinian journalist who covered Israel’s war crimes in hopes of one day ending the killings. His last post was from about a half hour ago reporting on the intensified bombings in Gaza City.

Can’t say why exactly, but the phrase “once again refused a pierogi” made me laugh out loud.

Postdoc (80%) in the Cognition Lab at University of Zurich, Switzerland We are looking for a postdoc to work with us on the capacity limits of cognition (working memory, attention, long-term memory, ...). Application deadline: 10 September 2025

In "Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge," Matilde Marcolli, Noam Chomsky, & Robert C. Berwick present a complete, precise mathematical formalization of Chomsky's most recent theory of Merge. #OpenAccess: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552523

PhD position to study conversational coordination with Prof Adrian Bangerter at Uni Neuchatel www.unine.ch/ipto/wp-cont...

Piss weak, genocide complicit, Australian government www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

automated message from hotel booking: "We're counting down the days until your arrival, eagerly anticipating the opportunity to provide you with a truly memorable stay. "

Growing up in an unconventional country town, PhD candidate @manikyaalister.bsky.social has always been fascinated by how people learn and make decisions. “We are social creatures that learn from each other every day.” Read more: go.unimelb.edu.au/wn7p

New volume on the interface between languages, human history, anthropology, archaeology and (a bit of) genetics, curated by M. Robbeets and M. Hudson. A very rich table of content for everyone interested in these multidisciplinary studies of the human past. I contributed two chapters:

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656 And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

First paper in Glossa Contact exemplifies LVP with a case study from Abui (Timor-Alor-Pantar language family), spoken in east Indonesia. Consider submitting your own research! #linguistics www.glossacontact.org/index.php/gc...

Does anyone know of studies about priming with non-default (marked) word order? #linguistics

when the most important thing is not to mention the genocide

Submit an abstract 📝 on your work on cross-linguistic aspects of language processing and (first) language acquisition to ⭐️Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL) 2025⭐️ (Sept 1&2 @ U Zurich)! It’s a fantastic venue to present work on how ling diversity 🌏 & the mind/🧠 interact!

A new paper out, on the diachrony of verbal classifiers - with particular attention to Daly languages of northern Australia www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

Stop Starving Gaza -------------------- More than 300 Israeli citizens who live in the UK call on the UK government to suspend the Trade and Partnership Agreement (TPA) with Israel immediately until it allows food and medicine into Gaza in significant quantities. actionnetwork.org/petitions/st...

Universities, your silence is deafening

Three year postdoc position in Cognitive Science, Potsdam, Germany: www.uni-potsdam.de/en/verwaltun...

If you're Jewish please sign this from Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza: foodaidforgaza.org and anyone can donate to the organization they recommend, Gaza soup kitchen, which serves up to 6000 meals daily: givebutter.com/AReeXq

🧪 The NSF grant terminations hit women, racial & ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities the hardest. E.g.: --Female PIs were 58% of canceled grants (but 34% of all active grants) --Black PIs were 17% of canceled grants (but 4% as base rate) A closer look shows this is structural... 🧵

📣Paper Update 📣It’s bigger! It’s better! Even if the language models aren’t. 🤖New version of “Bigger is not always Better: The importance of human-scale language modeling for psycholinguistics” osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our next ISLE Colloquium will be from @sebastiansauppe.bsky.social (Uni Zurich), on "Dependency structures in language processing and development" Tues 13 May 4:15pm UZH Oerlikon, room AFL-F-121 www.psychologie.uzh.ch/de/bereiche/...

Three linguistics jobs at Oxford!! Please spread the word. linguistlist.org/issues/36/14...

Postdoc open in Montreal for a field linguist with some technical skills 🐦🐦

We all have our moment

In awe of Fatima Hassouna www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

"Fatima Hassouna died with nine members of her family in a direct strike on their home in Gaza City on Wednesday."

The American Dipper babes are growing up quickly. Soon they're going to run out of room and will have to leave the nest. Washington state #birds #nature 🌿

I'll be teaching some students about the Lotka-Volterra food web model tomorrow, and this historical aside feels particularly relevant. Pretty stark that, in 1931, only 1% of Italian professors refused to sign a loyalty oath to the fascists.

Now out, "A Simple Explanation for Harmonic Word Order" - we show that a core typological pattern in syntax can be explained as a consequence of word-class frequencies, so it does not need to be posited as an independent principle. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....