It would be nice to still live in times when I mainly used social media to amplify cool sciency stuff. But these times have passed. open.substack.com/pub/christin...

Language Development Research, Volume 5, Issue 3 is now available for download on the LDR website. Thank you to all of our contributors! Wishing everyone a joyous New Year! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/101/in...

Superb video by @simonoxfphys.com Simon Clark on how truth on climate change is twisted and dismantled by Trump administration: www.youtube.com/watc.... 1/2 1/2

I finally got some time to flesh out my rant about these headlines... TL;DR: age differences ≠ aging jenndowd.substack.com/p/does-adole... #demography #episky #medsky #neurosky

Part 2 (10 mins) covering attacks on science, civil rights and how Trump wants to be a king. again there will be some short versions of some of it later this week... All based on www.trumpactiontracker.info youtu.be/9fudutXpn08

Columbia at least had the decency to wait until they were blackmailed before caving in. What's Cambridge's excuse?

Such a beautifully written piece about how medical hyper-specialisation makes it difficult to connect the dots as a complex systems approach would require.

Good news still exist.

Wieder eine faszinierende und lehrreiche Gelegenheit für mich, an einer deutschen Handbuchübersetzung mitzuwirken und weitere Übersetzungen zu koordinieren. Direkt zur deutschen Version geht es über diesen Link: sks.to/autocracy-de

As autocratization proceeds in the U.S. and elsewhere, it's time for a stock-take. Where are we, where are we going? What works? What might work better? Nearly 6 months after we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook sks.to/autocracy the SciBeh team is hosting its next big event .... 1/6

What enables human language? A biocultural framework. New paper by Inbal Arnon & al. with @limorraviv.bsky.social , @profsimonfisher.bsky.social doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8303

In light of the assault on American science by its own government that launched in January this year, we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook in June to provide some guidance to scholars about how to respond to an emerging autocracy. The handbook is available at: sks.to/autocracy. 1/n 1/4

Announcing publication of the full Special Issue of LDR on the Development of Metaphor. Thank you to Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Mary Beth Neff, PhD for organizing this volume and serving as Guest Editors! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/100/in...

The US funds the bulk of biomedical research globally by far. It's not like other countries can simply take up the slack. The more likely: people leave research, new people don't become researchers. There is no happy ending. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Would love to see some concrete ideas on how to start implementing community-based volunteer-driven science publishing. Maybe start by federating all existing diamond OA journals?

Congratulations to Chiara Pompei, Serena Lecce, Paola Del Sette, Elena Didoni, Luca Bischetti & Valentina Bambini on publication of The Role of Metaphor in Children's Persuasive Communication in the LDR Special Issue on Development of Metaphor Comprehension. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

New paper out today with Zhian Chen. We argue that modern intensive parenting is not only exhausting for parents, but in some cases disrupts healthy child development. What is 'overparenting'? And can evolutionary theory help us understand how we got here? academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

The latest from Trump world in under 2 minutes. youtu.be/CvwHfu0627w

New blog post! Let's say you have two measures meant to capture the same confounder. They're highly correlated. Can you still proceed with your regression analysis? (I admit, the title is a bit of a spoiler) www.the100.ci/2025/10/13/i...

No. There are no results. The paper is sloppy and laced with errors. For a rebuttal listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/n...

Do these idiots really want their GPs, consultants and professors to go do volunteering work rather than focus on their jobs? Trying to picture my breast surgeon steaming clothes at the charity shop…

"Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too." Read Gisela Salim-Peyer: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

💡 The idea that children drive language change is widely accepted — but does it hold up? New research co-authored by Dr Vera Kempe challenges this view, showing little evidence that child-led innovations spread through communities. Read more: www.mpi.nl/publications...

Super proud of this work and very grateful for all the amazing people who provided valuable feedback along the way @remivantrijp.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @cedricboeckx.bsky.social @inbalarnon.bsky.social ❤️❤️❤️🙏

So rewarding to work with these two brilliant people to check whether the existing evidence supports the persistent claim that children's simplifying errors drive language change. It doesn't. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d... @limorraviv.bsky.social @damianblasi.bsky.social

I remember the great kindness with which Wietske welcomed us into the scientific community when a bunch of us clueless ECRs crawled out from behind the Iron Curtain in the early 90s. RIP Wietske Vonk www.mpi.nl/news/wietske...

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Staying with me after yesterday's #uklvc15 poster session is Schaeffler et al.'s point that Child-Directed Speech was different in soviet East Germany than in the West. Less influence on individualism influences CDS phonetic features! #acquisition #linguistics #sociolinguistics #contextmatters

No evidence for generational differences in the conventionalisation of face emojis. New paper by Kempe and @limorraviv.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...

🤔Compared to GenX/Boomers or Millennials, do GenZ have larger online social networks and, as a result, greater agreement with their peers on what emojis mean? Find the answer in this fun little paper with @limorraviv.bsky.social ⬇️: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Read and repost: open.substack.com/pub/christin...

@alastaircampbell2.bsky.social Seriously?

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

This is an incredibly informative resource for anyone following the depredations of the orange, mapped against five broad areas of authoritarianism in the US today. It's hard to keep up with the daily outrages.👇🏼

Congrats to Marisa Casillas, @ruthefoushee.bsky.social, Humbertina Gómez Pérez, Juan Méndez Girón, Gilles Polian, Kennedy Casey & Penelope Brown on their work adapting the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for Tseltal, out today in LDR ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Read new work by Pelin Küçükerdoğan and Deniz Tahiroğlu on children's metaphor comprehension in Language Development Research! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Not sure who wants to know this but after a year of interacting with ChatGPT 4o with memory I asked it to score my personality on all the models (Big5, HEXACO, Dark+Light Triad). All I can say - it knows me very well.

Excited to share this newly published paper on child-directed speech in the Ku Waru and Nungon languages of Papua New Guinea. Congratulations to Hannah Sarvasy, Alan Rumsey, Josua Dahmen, John Onga, and Stephanie Yam! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

The lessons from Lysenkoism: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Congratulations to Mary Beth Neff and Ingrid Lossius Falkum on publication of their new paper "Decoupling literalist behavior from children’s early metaphor comprehension abilities" in LDR as part of a special issue on development of metaphor comprehension. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Congrats to Anat Prior & Gal Pedael on publication of their new paper on bilingual language development in Language Development Research! It illustrates differential effects of type and token frequencies in the input on children's lexical & morphol. knowledge. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/7...

#Odesa is on fire.The city's historic center is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. "High-culture" Russians are barbarians in reality.What they can't steal,they destroy The attention of the world is on the Middle East these days.Russia continues going unpunished, will continue destroying #Ukraine

Scientists have come under pressure in the information age; with fascist myth-making and autocratic political movements leading the anti-science aggression. @lewan.bsky.social put together a team to provide key info & guidance. I have some thoughts: www.protagonist-science.com/p/the-anti-a... 1/

Amazing collective effort!

Another superb quantitative analysis by @chrischirp.bsky.social of how Trump regime is increasingly suppressing dissent christinapagel.substack.com/p/americas-d... But midnight hasn't struck yet. So takehome message: "Keep dissenting – exercise your rights today to preserve them for tomorrow."

Glad I could spread the word about the attacks on US science to a global group (esp since unfortunately attacks on universities are a problem worldwide). Talked about what's happening, the importance of still asking important research questions, and how to move forward. More at rdcu.be/emD0Z