I’m hiring an 18-month postdoc to work on physics-informed machine learning for acoustic-articulatory speech inversion at @phoneticslab.bsky.social 🗓️ Deadline: Friday 10 April. 🔗 More info & applications: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... 📣 Please share with anyone who might be a good fit!

I’m hiring an 18-month postdoc to work on physics-informed machine learning for acoustic-articulatory speech inversion at @phoneticslab.bsky.social 🗓️ Deadline: Friday 10 April. 🔗 More info & applications: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... 📣 Please share with anyone who might be a good fit!

Deadline 4 Jan: Postdoc, variability and vowel harmony, metaphony (phonetic and psycholinguistic approaches), Potsdam (w/ A. Gafos) docs.google.com/document/d/1...

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

And you can hear all about Nosey, nasalance and 3D printing (and mysterious bonus content??) from @samkirkham.bsky.social on Tuesday afternoon (A02-O3)! 📄 www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...

Pat Strycharczuk will be presenting our paper at #Interspeech2025 on Wednesday afternoon (A02-O6), where we applied forensic speaker comparison methods to ultrasound tongue imaging data to think about the individuality of articulatory strategy 📄 www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...

Very happy to have been awarded an APEX grant for a project on “Interpretable acoustic-articulatory relations in speech production” w/ co-investigators Anton Ragni & Aneta Stefanovska. The plan is to do some interesting speech research at the intersection of linguistics, physics & computer science!

Presenting some stuff from my dissertation at this cool workshop in a couple weeks on dynamical models of speech: samkirkham.github.io/dymos/ Doing a lot of reading/prep work as I am the "symbolicist" going to talk to a bunch of "dynamacists". Should be fun! (seriously)

Here are my slides: www.scott-nelson.net/Presentation... I started my talk by saying, “usually when you’re a phonologist who is interested in phonetics you get more concrete but I decided to get more abstract instead.” If that’s of interest to you then you might be interested in checking these out!

MLX, Apple’s machine learning framework, just merged a CUDA Backend.

 Matmul, tensor copy ops, and other core CUDA primitives are now part of Apple’s official build.

 There’s a lot of hype + confusion. Here’s what it is, and…isn’t.

More details on this soon! Also this weekend is the last chance to submit your TTS system for the next round of evaluation (Q2 2025) by either messaging me at [email protected] or requesting a model here: huggingface.co/spaces/ttsds...

deadline 23 June!! Please re-bleat(??) widely!

Introducing the tidynorm package! It's got convenience functions for applying your favorite vowel normalization methods to point measures, formant tracks, and DCT coefficients in a tidyverse workflow, as well as a flexible framework for defining your own normalization methods!

🐠🦠Why can’t bacteria swim like fish? At microscopic scales, physics changes — viscosity rules! Researchers at our institute study how microbes like E. coli overcome this challenge with clever strategies like run-and-tumble. Watch our new video: youtu.be/drwCRRD7CGY?...

There's a lot of big news today/this week, but Apple just dropped a nuke of a paper about LLMs & LRMs, specially around "high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse." This is the biggest sign yet that if AI ever lives up the hype, it won't be via those approaches:

🚨 PhD call in Neurosciences @UNIMORE_univ is open! Join our Cognitive Neuroscience & Psychology lab in Reggio Emilia 🇮🇹 – a vibrant, livable city. We study cognitive control, perception-action links & social cognition using EEG, behavioral, mathematical & computational modeling. 🧠👇

We are very excited that Samuel Schmück has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a great project on speech analytics and under-represented language varieties in speech technology. Many congratulations Sam! @samschmueck.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk

Hot off the press! My tutorial on ultrasound data collection & analysis is now out. Open Access. Part of a special issue in the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, with lots of other cool studies. Articulatory phonetics is going strong in Japan! www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/onse...

We have two papers accepted at #Interspeech2025! ✨ ➡️ Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance arxiv.org/abs/2505.23339 ➡️ Articulatory strategy in vowel production as a basis for speaker discrimination arxiv.org/abs/2505.20995 + I'll also be giving a survey talk! See you in Rotterdam! 🇳🇱

Glossogram with dark red indicating constriction and blue diagonal (tongue compartment contracted) demonstrating peristaltic transfer of water bolus from oral-pharyngeal. This is easiest to explain as sequential extension of neuromuscular compartments of the tongue.

my lab (lacns.github.io) at @mpi-nl.bsky.social and @dondersinst.bsky.social is recruiting for two PhD and two postdoctoral positions funded by an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator - come join us! PhD: www.mpi.nl/career-educa... Postdoc: www.mpi.nl/career-educa... (please share widely)

As part of the #ViTraLiP transnational course, our virtual guest was @samkirkham.bsky.social from Lancaster University. During our exchange in #Paris, we were able to attend his talk at the #SRPP colloquium. Thanks to @lppparis.bsky.social for inviting us! Read more here: tinyurl.com/vitralip.

2. Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance - led by PhD student Maya Dewhurst, with Jack Collins, Roy Alderton & Sam Kirkham (psst there's 3D printing in there)

We've got 2 papers accepted to #Interspeech2025 (although you'll only see my collaborators and not me at Rotterdam 🥲): 1. Articulatory strategy in vowel production as a basis for speaker discrimination - with Pat Strycharczuk & Sam Kirkham @phoneticslab.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social

I've felt for a while that a mainstream method, reverse engineering, in cognitive science & AI is incompatible w computationalism‼️ So I wrote "Modern Alchemy: Neurocognitive Reverse Engineering" w the wonderful Natalia S. & @irisvanrooij.bsky.social to elaborate: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/25289/ 1/n

✨Discovering dynamical laws for speech gestures ✨ ➡️ I’m delighted to announce my new article out today in Cognitive Science, where I discover simple mathematical laws that govern articulatory control in speech. 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @cogscisociety.bsky.social

I wrote some software that visualises real-time nasalance for our @phoneticslab.bsky.social public engagement event this week! We use two microphones to capture oral and nasal signals, separated by a baffle, and map each signal's amplitude to a visual representation of the face!

Our new paper on "Dimensionality Reduction in Lingual Articulation of Vowels" is now out in Language & Speech! How should we quantify tongue shape in vowel production? We evaluate various measures and identify multi-dimensional measures for vowel analysis. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Spring reading! Looking forward to (slowly) making it through the four volumes of “Foundational papers in complexity science” @sfiscience.bsky.social

Great SRPP (@lppparis.bsky.social) talk on speech modelling by @samkirkham.bsky.social (@phoneticslab.bsky.social) 👅 A very clear overview of why we should care about modelling and the considerations that need to be made when creating new models. 🧠

Scaling laws for nonlinear dynamical models of articulatory control ➡️ My new article out today in JASA Express Letters, in which I present some new advances on nonlinear task dynamic models of articulatory speech movements. 🔗 doi.org/10.1121/10.0... @asa-news.bsky.social

The call for papers for UKLVC15 is open! Deadline: 21st March. Join us in Lancaster 2nd-4th September 2025 for sociolinguistic research on any language. Hosted by @lancslinguistics.bsky.social and University of Central Lancashire. More information and keynote presenters: wp.lancs.ac.uk/uklvc15/

💣 praatpicture version 1.4.0 on CRAN! 💣 (1/3)

📣Amazing opportunity for #speech researchers! Postdoc Position: Computational Modelling of Speech Recognition at the Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands More info: www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Bluesky newbie here 😅 pls share these two PhD opportunities for Oct 2025! 1. Auditory processing and ADHD (with Alice Milne). 2. Sleep and cognitive recovery in age-related hearing loss (with Sana Hannan). Fully-funded studentships are available, deadline 16th Jan www.lancaster.ac.uk/psychology/s...

🔴 Paper submission platform for #Interspeech2025 is now open! www.interspeech2025.org/paper-submis...

New preprint! The affordance hypothesis With @diovicen.bsky.social doi.org/10.31234/osf...

📣 Submissions for #CogSci2025 are now OPEN! 🌍 This year’s conference is fully hybrid — join us in San Francisco or online! 🔍 Review the submission guidelines ⬇️ Download the required templates 🗓️ Make note of key deadline dates cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/

New paper out with colleagues from @phoneticslab.bsky.social 'Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection' doi.org/10.1515/ling... @samkirkham.bsky.social @takayukinagamine.bsky.social @pamelaforster.bsky.social @justinjhlo.bsky.social

In non-grant-related news, I've packaged up some tools for working with REAPER in R. (For the uninitiated, REAPER is a very nice pitch tracking tool made by David Talkin which works particularly well for non-modal speech) github.com/rpuggaardrod...

Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad. I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.

Just posted an updated version of this preprint - Scaling laws for nonlinear dynamical models of articulatory control - including some theoretical implications of the new model! arxiv.org/abs/2411.12720

Hello, Bluesky! This is the account for the Association for Laboratory Phonology, #LabPhon. Follow here to learn about new publications in our journal, and other Association news. #linguistics #phonetics #phonology

✨i'm hiring a lab manager, with a start date of ~September 2025! to express interest, please complete this google form: forms.gle/GLyAbuD779Rz... looking for someone to join our multi-disciplinary team, using OPM, EEG, iEEG and computational techniques to study speech and language processing! 🧠

Very proud of my PhD student Emily Gorman for passing her viva today - she wrote a great thesis on “Spatial and temporal variation in speech planning”. Many thanks to the examiners Marianne Pouplier and Danielle Turton for an interesting and rigorous examination. Congratulations Emily!

We've been hosting Simona Montanari, California State University, @phoneticslab.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social for the past couple of days. Great to hear about Simona's research on Spanish-English bilingual pre-schoolers and celebrate at our lab Christmas party!

Open call for PhD at Rothschild Hospital (Paris) w/ Dr Pierre Bourdillon and me to study the brain bases of language production with intracranial recordings: dim-cbrains.fr/en/phd-progr... - MSc outside France and no work in France in the past 2 years. - Deadline Jan 30th 2025

TIL that printers secretly add yellow dots to make printed pages uniquely identifiable: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer...

Acquiring tongue shape complexity in consonants with multiple articulations ➡️ New paper in Proc. ISAPh with @clrnance.bsky.social on Gaelic-English bilingual children’s development of lingual articulation. 🔗 www.isca-archive.org/isaph_2024/n...