A quick read to start off 2026…

Why do some advanced L2 learners process grammar in real time—and others don’t? 🤔 New paper w López-Beltrán, Dussias & @mh-christiansen.bsky.social We find that chunking ability -not working memory- predicts online sensitivity to L2 morphosyntax. 📄 doi.org/10.1177/0267... (Open Access)

For those of you who read Danish 🇩🇰, here's an article based on an interview I did about language evolution and LLMs. We discuss how LLMs are forcing language scientists to rethink biological constraints on language (despite differences between humans and LLMs) blog.minlaering.dk/blogindlaeg/...

Sepsal recenzi na popularizační knihu The Language Game od Chatera a Christiansena @mh-christiansen.bsky.social. Je zdařilý úvod, který bere náhled evoluce a komunikace a kontrastuje s chomskyánským Jazykovým instinktem od Pinkera. Doporučuji pro výuku úvodů! digilib.phil.muni.cz/sites/defaul...

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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...

Congratulations to Dr. @sere-yu-wang.bsky.social for defending her PhD dissertation with flying colors! 👏

I am very saddened to see Cornell comply with the Trump administration’s dictatorial demands. @cornellaaup.bsky.social provides a careful analysis of the potential dire consequences of this capitulation

Conversational turn-taking feels effortless, but it's a complex dance. We find social context—who you're talking to and what you're talking about—fundamentally changes conversational dynamics in both autistic & TD children. 1/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... w @chrismmcox.bsky.social

Human language acquisition and use is fundamentally interactive. By contrast, LLMs are generally assumed to be passive learners that merely soak up vast amounts of data, like a sponge. In this opinion piece, we argue that the picture is more nuanced 1/2 www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Know someone whose excellence in research and contributions to the CogSci community should be recognized? Nominate them to be a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society! Deadline: Nov 1 More info: cognitivesciencesociety.org/fellows/

Come see Cris Rivera's poster tomorrow at #AMLaP2025 👇

3️⃣ 2️⃣ 1️⃣ Just three days left to submit your nomination for the Early Career Talk at the #IASL26 conference. 🔗 ugent.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Check out the two posters from @csl-lab.bsky.social at #CogSci2025 on Friday and Saturday in Salon 8.

Just in time for the @cogscisociety.bsky.social conference and the Rumelhart 25th Anniversary Event, the 2023 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Nick Chater is out in TopiCS in Cognitive Science, edited by Mike Oaksford and me: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765... 🧵 1/3

Happy to contribute an article on #LanguageEvolution to the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science @oecs-bot.bsky.social Everything you ever wanted to know about language evolution in ~1K words—well just scratching the surface 😉 dig into the references for more info oecs.mit.edu/pub/18miikqb...

🏅 💬 At the '22 edition of our conference, we launched the Early Career Talk, giving a platform to an outstanding early-career scientist. We are now seeking nominations for the Early Career Talk at the #IASL26 edition. The deadline for nominations is August 15, 2025. Instructions in the thread.

📣 Save the date 🗓️ to present your exciting statistical learning research at the 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference June 10-12 2026 in San Sebastián 🇪🇸 Keynotes by @jennysaffran.bsky.social @noranewcombe.bsky.social @pyoudeyer.bsky.social More info to follow #IASL26

I'm excited about this TICS Opinion with @yngwienielsen.bsky.social, challenging the view that structural priming—the tendency to reuse a recent syntactic structure—provides evidence for the psychological reality of grammar-based constituent structure. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lIFK4sIRv... 🧵1/4

Nick Chater now introducing the idea of social tinkering and spontaneous order and their role in the origin of language @mh-christiansen.bsky.social #LLGAwayDay @warwickpsych.bsky.social

Nick Chater joins us online to present his work on spontaneous communicative conventions with @mh-christiansen.bsky.social @warwickpsych.bsky.social #LLGAwayDay

Last was "The Language Game" by @mh-christiansen.bsky.social & Nick Chater, who cover the neurological underpinnings of language, linguistic theory, and the philosophy of language with scientific rigor and an engaging narrative. Highly recommend Full review: bookwyrm.social/user/bwaber/... (12/12)

Our daily lives are packed w complex behaviours: reading a novel & piecing together the plot; negotiating decisions w family... How do we build mathematical models of the underlying cognitive mechanisms? Our new preprint osf.io/d2v54_v1 argues for a community approach A 🧵 1/

Every year at the end of the semester, I ask the students in my Psych of Language class to create memes about what they've learned. They then vote for their favorites. Here's the winner about how the idea of a universal grammar is no longer as compelling as it once seemed. 1/5

We are looking for a Phd student for a project on modeling second language learning using adaptive cognitive tutors. Please share with anyone who might be interested! phd.arts.au.dk/applicants/o...

What is human #StatisticalLearning for? The standard assumption is that the goal of SL is to learn the regularities in the environment to guide behavior. In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that SL instead is provides the basis for novelty detection within an information foraging system 1/2

Before joining Bluesky, I gave a talk in the Language Circle speaker series organized by @languagecycles.bsky.social. If you're interested, there's a link to the video below (and feel to also follow @csl-lab.bsky.social for further updates on our work).

This is really intriguing work! Cave art is not just for (and by) grownups! Children are often left out of the picture when it come to prehistory but no longer. Well worth a read!

This is a great loss for his family, his friends, his colleagues, and AU. I will miss my friend and dear colleague deeply. He was an excellent scientist and a wonderful human being.

How can distributional semantics models (such as LLMs) capture so many meaning-related phenomena without implementing essential dimensions of human semantic processing, e.g. sensorimotor grounding? We offer a tentative answer in our TopiCS article: (free read) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

I made a Starter Pack for Language Evolution. But I just added a small bunch of names that came to mind. (I don't know who's on Bluesky yet.) So please add a comment below if you're a language evolution person and I will add more names soon. go.bsky.app/87rRCf7

If you're at Psychonomics (#psynom24), make sure you go see my grad student Serene Wang's excellent poster tonight. It's poster # 7028. Also ask her about her recent review paper about the importance of chunking in L2 learning and processing: eurokd.com/doi/10.32038...

This is a great opportunity to join a group of excellent researchers, who are also wonderful human beings!

Just migrated here from academic twitter. Good to get back in touch with old connections and look forward to making new ones. I will post on all things #language, including #processing, #acquisition, and #evolution; #statistical-earning, #corpus-analyses, #LLMs, #L2-learning, #conversation and more