With big thanks to Alexey Koshevoy, @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social Marie Hallo @marie-hl.bsky.social and Rowan Hall Maudslay!

New post: Tagging my blog with BERTopic and LLMs. I suspect as token costs increase, we'll see more blended traditional ML/LLM systems. And, in general, they work really well! vickiboykis.com/2026/05/18/t...

🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6

Out today in @science.org: with the amazing Haochuan Cui, Yiling Lin, & @lingfeiwu.bsky.social, we analyzed 3.6 million scientists publishing 1960–2020. The findings reshape a century-old debate about age and scientific creativity.

Join us in Barcelona for a postdoc! We are looking for candidates with a strong NLP/ML/AI background and an interest in linguistic diversity and human and machine cognition: dub.sh/blasi_nlp_po...

“We have added an AI system to our service to make it more efficient.” The efficiency in question:

I was preparing a seminar, and accidentally created some Mondrian-style plots:

That's a very cool game. I got 40.46, even though visually all of my colors were very much off.

New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Interesting counterpoint to the arguments that LLMs capture linguistic complexity: "..model behavior is mainly driven by the richness of linguistic resources rather than by sensitivity to grammatical complexity, (thus) resembles human (language) only superficially." doi.org/10.1371/jour...

New! For robust research, center values, not technology, w/ @nerdpro.bsky.social zenodo.org/records/1894... Our commentary on Futrell/Mahowald "How linguistics stopped worrying and learned to love the LMs”, forthcoming in BBS

a gpt in a sublime 200 lines of pure Python — it is all there. Incredible for teaching students (and yourself) karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/m...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

Very interesting attempt to trace back the early evolution of a “system of conventional signs” (proto-writing system) 🧪✍️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Come work with the best advisor ever (speaking from experience here)!

Quick, now: which is bigger, 25234991 or 25234? Next: which is bigger, MMI or DCCCLXIV? Some numerical notations' conciseness indexes their magnitude well, some less so. But how does that matter cross-culturally for their adoption and retention? Check it out @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

That's nice -- a very cool applied result.

AI agents are becoming a serious threat to research data quality. Today we’re rolling out Bot authenticity checks on @joinprolific.bsky.social, detecting agentic AI with 100% accuracy in testing. Comes with a native Qualtrics integration! More info: www.prolific.com/resources/in...

What a cool resource! I am a bit to the left of where I would expect myself to be situated, but it is about right.

I just discovered that you can bypass the synchronization limit on zotero by using Koofr (a very funny name btw) through webDAV. That way you can save up to 10gb of papers and read them on multiple devices for free! Finally I can use my 10-year old iPad for something useful!

BayesFlow to the people!

Who is the Big Tobacco of today? In new work, we find 50% of high profile social media papers are connected to big tech through funding, collaboration and employment. Most connections aren't disclosed. @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @jevinwest.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com 1 arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

New paper with @inbalarnon.bsky.social and @simonkirby.bsky.social! Learnability pressures drive the emergence of core statistical properties of language–e.g. Zipf's laws–in an iterated sequence learning experiment, with learners’ RTs indicating sensitivity to the emerging sequence information.

This is absolutely wild, and super important. There are zillions of studies claiming that fMRI signals indicate increased brain activity, and it looks like that's often just wrong. If confirmed, this means we've misinterpreted a lot of research.

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Still the best course if you want to actually understand Bayesian stats.

At last, the final publication in 'Cognitive Technologies and their Histories': the editorial introduction to the issue in TopiCS, by myself and @helenamiton.bsky.social. 4.5 years since our initial @cogscisociety.bsky.social panel. Free access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Such a nice idea!

Oh, man. After reading the article, what it actually says is that an historian did a lot of archival work and spatial research to determine the site of a killing and then the family of the likely perpetrator stepped forward with photographs to confirm identity. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Huge congratulations to @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social l who defended his PhD thesis today!! with his co-supervisor @sblldtrch.bsky.social and jury members @simonkirby.bsky.social @gboleda.bsky.social Paula Rubio Fernandez & Benjamin Spector.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

::slowly stands while clapping::

New paper! ⚡ With Gabriel Aguirre and Marcelo Sánchez, looking at patterns of blowgun types and use across societies of the world. We find areal patterns, similarities mediated by cultural connections, and specific types characterizing distinct branches of the Austronesian language tree. 🎯

I am on a 6 hour train journey without air conditioning, but it’s worth it because I am heading to #SLE2025! This is my first linguistics conference in a while.

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

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.

Want to easily scrape data from news media sites? There's an R package for that! paperboy "paperboy offers writers of web scrap[ers] a clear path to publish their code & earn co-authorship on the package, while deliver[ing] news media data from many websites in a consistent format."

For some reason bluesky doesn’t work on Firefox anymore, event after I updated it. Is it the case for anyone else?

:: (not really) Trigger warning:: Stay in your lane, or pay a career penalty www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Language depends on copying (e.g. of words, signs). And language in turn is needed for many other things. When and why did our ancestors gain this ability to copy? Our (Ron, Elisa & me) archaeological reanalysis says: in the last million years. Just out: dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

🚨New publication alert! "Corpus-based approaches to evolutionary dynamics in language" (w/ @stefanhartmann.bsky.social) out now in the in the Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution. Kudos to @limorraviv.bsky.social & @cedricboeckx.bsky.social for putting this great volume together!

you know all gen 1 pokémon, of course you could. reminded of brandmaier.github.io/ggx/

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete. My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more. (link 👇)