⚠️ New paper! Why do words sound so similar? In an agent-based model + communication game, we show that production/comprehension pressures trade off to shape lexicon structure. In @cognitionjournal.bsky.social w/ @simonkirby.bsky.social & Jenny Culbertson. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper in @openmindjournal.bsky.social with @simonkirby.bsky.social, @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Fiona Jordan! Kinship terms overwhelmingly exhibit predictive structure - terms in one part of the system help us predict other terms - a pattern which emerges because it helps us generalise better.

My first ever book cover! Made with maths, pencil, drawing robot, and photographic negative. Thank you @limorraviv.bsky.social and @cedricboeckx.bsky.social for asking me to do it, and for the lovely handwritten dedication inside 😊

Delighted to announce the publication of a collaborative effort, co-led by @limorraviv.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social, showcasing the ways in which researchers have made language evolution an empirical issue: A handbook of experimental approaches to the fascinating problem of language evolution 🧪

Language and Communication is on the GESDA science breakthrough radar for the first time! Language evolution, AI, empirical method and multilingualism are the four core topics. Make your views known on how likely breakthroughs are in these areas, and how soon they might happen: tinyurl.com/2r29yep6

Join us at the National Museum of Scotland July 19th to learn about animal communication and what makes human communication different from the rest of our primate family! 🐵 www.nms.ac.uk/events/monke...

Introducing Dr Keogh! 🎓 Very emotional to have finally closed the chapter on my time at the @uoe-cle.bsky.social 😭 but glad to have passed this milestone in the company of my wonderful supervisors @simonkirby.bsky.social and Jenny Culbertson, and my PhD twin Elizabeth Pankratz. We made it! #PhDone

Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics https://go.nature.com/4jGqiUc

So lucky and proud to have someone as dedicated to his students as Christian as a colleague.

Earlier this month, @nerdpro.bsky.social and I collaborated on an Atmosphere screening of my favourite film, Arrival. It was a lot of fun projecting animated Heptapod writing and quotations from Chiang’s original. We also wrote an essay you might like: www.mediascot.org/atmosphere/a...

Many thanks to @wired.com & @thiccreese.bsky.social for covering our work on stereotype bias!! The new dataset is SHADES, now available here: huggingface.co/datasets/LanguageShades/BiasShades The first of its kind for analyzing GenAI stereotyping across many languages+cultures. Published at NAACL.🤗

If six months ago you'd told me that in autumn 2025 I'd have to go to Canada to get my annual COVID vaccine but I wouldn't do it because coming back through immigrations was too risky for someone who had criticized the government, I would have looked at you like you were having a stroke.

"Funk was a genre of sonic color, a genre that crossed oceans, a genre rooted in radical joy and inclusivity. We Want The Funk! makes clear that Black art is not just expression — it’s liberation." -Black Enterprise review. The full documentary is online:

All new research grants have been frozen at the US National Science Foundation — an action apparently ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency https://go.nature.com/42pvdDe

NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests. Story by @aniloza.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/04/21/t...

IPSOS finds collapse in European pro-US sentiment in last 6 months. In October 2024 50% of Dutch thought the US would have a positive influence on the world; in April 2024 that has plummeted to 20%. Similar drops in France, Italy, Germany et al. www.ipsos.com/en/americas-...

These are now woke DEI books

Didn't take too long, apparently: forward.com/fast-forward...

New NSF "Broad Impact" guidelines, "Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities" #Linguistics #DeafCommunities #IndigenousCommunities #RacializedCommunities #MinoritizedCommunities

This is simply extraordinary. The Trump administration's argument is, essentially: if you receive some massively aggressive legal missive from the White House, don't respond in a timely way. Instead, chill out for a bit, in case we take it all back.

Given the state of the US, there's an opportunity for UK HE to stick its nostrils above the waves for a bit and keep paddling, but the govt's terror about Reform in the red wall will, it seems, block that and leave one of the UK's international export successes to drown. Totally irrational.

I am genuinely baffled by mainstream political antipathy towards international students (which is not shared by the voting public, who are presumably delighted that they subsidise their kids’ education). The only “problem” solved by dissuading them from coming is the existence of universities at all

The court *explicitly* does not attempt to define “woman”. No matter the harms this judgment will cause an endlessly beleaguered & oppressed minority (whilst doing nothing about the real source of gender-based violence), we should not allow lazy headline writers to claim it means more that it does.

An astonishing headline reporting on new observations from a team led to Nikku Madhusudhan claims they’ve found ‘hints of life’ on a planet orbiting a dwarf star some 124 light years away. What’s going on? (1/n) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 🔭 🧪

Solidarity with my trans friends & colleagues on a difficult day for them. Depressing to hear that (once again) trans voices seem to have been left out of evidence gathering by the court. Let’s not allow this ruling to be overzealously interpreted by those trying to erase trans voices even further.

"I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do mind when you publish more quickly than you think." Wolfgang Pauli

Imagine trying to deport someone for their "expected beliefs"

Lecturer in #Sociolinguistics @christianilbury.bsky.social leads the charge against linguistic prejudice in academia. At Speaking Out, researchers & students came confronted #accentbias - that unfairly links how we speak with how we're judged. Read More: edin.ac/3Ei04Zc

Everyone should listen to this podcast featuring British Guardian reporter @adamgabbatt.bsky.social from beginning to end. It’s very difficult to feel fully safe about totally “white” non-Muslim Western friends in the US now, let alone non-white & Muslim students. open.spotify.com/episode/1EVS...

How it started / How it's going

Postdoc opening in beautiful Stockholm 🇸🇪! Join us at Karolinska Institutet to explore how interdependent traits shape social learning and cultural evolution. 🧠 Behavioral + computational work 🤝 Work w/ labs in Amsterdam @lucasmolleman.bsky.social & Leuven Details: shorturl.at/Wzy9o

Super cool work! The method used here is very exciting and suggests that some form of compositionality could potentially be widespread outside of language! How similar (in form and origins) this type of compositionality is to what we find in language remains I think an open question.

🚨New in @science.org🚨 With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

"we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features & recognize it as a political artifact through & through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority & autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power" i finally read this & it's 🔥🔥🔥

This Sunday join @simonkirby.bsky.social for a special screening of Arrival (2016) a sublime experience that transcends traditional science-fiction cinema. The event, organised by Edinburgh Science Festival and Grassmarket Community Project begins at 6.30pm. Tickets available here: edin.ac/4ch0X0J

WORLD-FIRST: Ground-breaking research published today in the Ornithologist Journal has, for the first time, translated common UK bird vocalisations into equivalent phrases in the human language. The results tell us a lot! Extracts below... 🧵

💥🇭🇺 Police have given up guarding Budapest’s Liberty Bridge as anti-government protesters shut down traffic on four major bridges, rallying against Viktor Orbán’s new law curbing freedom of assembly and banning the Pride march. They vow to escalate with a 24-hour shutdown next week.

remember how everyone told you anti-trans legislation and anti-trans discrimination would hurt cis folks too? www.comicsands.com/woman-fired-...

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

I know the right wing media finds it all very difficult so, in an attempt to be helpful, this is what an actual interference with free speech looks like.

A chilling thought: "So if the aloof trustees of Harvard, Princeton, Yale et al think that their august institutions lie beyond his reach, perhaps they should understand that Trump looks on them much as Henry VIII looked on the rich monasteries of his heyday." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Worth adding that the American Dream exists, not in America, but in... Denmark.

DOGE/Musk preferentially cancelled grants and contracts to recipients in counties that voted for Harris in 2024. Among cancellations with election data available, 92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.

I only wrote this substack *yesterday* about the dangers of being a foreign student or academic in the US, but I am already having to update it as more disappearances and visa revocations happen. christinapagel.substack.com/p/trumps-att...

Hundreds of international students have just received an email telling them their visas have been revoked. The ‘justification’ is campus activism or social media posts. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/hun...

Colleagues are cancelling their US work trips. I worry that international colleagues in the US are at risk if they collaborate with us on certain topics. I've written a new post about the increasing danger of being a foreign scientist in the US. christinapagel.substack.com/p/trumps-att...

What is happening to US democracy is obviously very worrying and heartbreaking, but I’m concerned that the complacent attitude in the UK is that it wouldn’t happen here, when it very easily could. In some ways, from the “hostile environment” to limits on protest, it already has.

Extremely disappointing & cowardly. The American Psychological Association is rescinding diversity requirements. Not due to any actual mandate from the federal government, but only because it may *someday* face pressure from the government www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/h...

Disappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.

Most clarifying era in politics in America as anything I can recall because it’s so simple: You’re either for this or against. Pick a side.