This is an artificial mouth created by Japanese researchers. It uses artificial vocal cords, a trachea system, and a flexible silicone mouth that moves and shapes sound in real time. It sounds so human-like!

From the superb Félix Vallotton exhibition at MCBA Lausanne, this is one of many striking and unusual landscapes: Le rayon, 1909, Private collection. Read about the show (the best we've been to this year) on our blog: art-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2025/12/thro...

I'm very grateful to have been awarded grant funding from the European Research Council @erc.europa.eu . I like that this grant scheme allows for untried methods.

biggest problem with coding is doing something quick-and-dirty just to get the process working, then you forget and it becomes part of the code... months later you find this hacky little thing spreading its corruption

so lucky to have Jane Simpson as a PhD boss, what a great role model. She does academia with integrity and generosity; her life work is both brilliant analysis of Australian languages (with more to come), and hundreds of people she helped along the way. researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/j...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

I wonder what the Microsoft people think "Do not ask again" means

THE DUFFER BROTHERS

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof). We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice! international.au.dk/about/profil...

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social) Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

How are we still making discoveries about the 5000-year-old ancestor to English, Latin, Czech, Hindi and many other languages? In our latest episode we get enthusiastic about figuring out Proto-Indo-European with @dannybate.bsky.social!

my understanding of semantics comes from Guess Who

enjoying the vibe of an academic article, without really being able to say exactly what it was about

I just sent an "oops sorry here's the attachment" email, but still without the attachment

“social reproduction” is so cool bc it could just mean whatever you want it to mean

Since 7th Oct 2023, Israeli prisons have become torture camps of the worst kind. www.972mag.com/98-palestini...

Our Anthropological Linguistics group at Uni Zurich has a webpage now: www.isle.uzh.ch/en/AnthroL.h...

Struck this morning by how the win wasn’t from the UC system itself pushing back—it was its worker power through *unions* and aligned groups like @aaup.org defending UC interests, even though admin itself wasn’t. There’s some kind of lesson here

If you are in NY on Wednesday, I will be moderating this discussion of B'Tselem's research and recent report on the genocide in Gaza. Link to register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

#Vacancies: we are looking for not just one but three #postdoctoral researchers interested in bridging #genetics, #archaeology and #linguistics in exploring the #humanpast. shorturl.at/B3Qdd @haam-community.bsky.social @cschlebu.bsky.social

„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!