ICYMI Dept of Education will no longer considers these professional degrees: Nursing Public health Social work Physician assistant Occupational therapy Physical therapy Audiology Speech-language pathology Social work Counseling & therapy Health Admin A smaller health workforce makes us all sicker

Much of the way we articulate words isn’t random. It reflects how the brain balances effort & clarity. Common words are shorter & more “shrunk”, confusable words are pronounced more clearly. We asked if ASL signs show similar patterns of reduction using pose-tracking on thousands of ASL signs.

In good news today, ASL live interpreting is to be reinstated for White House press briefings! slator.com/us-judge-rul...

New case study of a Deaf autistic signer finds autism affects both linguistic and affective facial expressions, supporting accounts grounded in motor and maybe prosodic difficulties. Also supports effective languaging strategies beyond the neurotypical norm. www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15...

The CLaP Lab had an amazing time connecting with the Deaf community at DeaFestival Riverside! 🧠✨ Thanks to everyone who stopped by to learn about language, the brain, and our research! www.claplab.org #deafawarenessmonth

Using standardized ERPCore tasks, our new study shows subtle but consistent neural adaptations in visual recognition, attention, motor preparation or memory updating in deaf ASL signers, possibly due to lifelong experience with visual communication. Poster A48 🙂 with @erinecampbell.bsky.social

Coming at you from Gallaudet University to share that on-the-ground prep for the Society for Neurobiology of Language #SNL2025 is well underway! We cannot wait to welcome more than 500 of you, neuroscientists and linguists, to our campus tomorrow! Say hi if you see me running around!

🧠 #sign #language #linguists this conference in #Poland looks interesting!

The ManyTones project is looking for several lead positions. See poster for details. 📢📣✨ Get involved! 🎉🤝🌟

Want to know more about the Family ASL project? Check out our new paper “Language and Cognitive Development in Bimodal Bilingual Deaf Children in Hearing Families: Three Case Studies.” It’s part of a special issue on Lang & Cog Dev in Deaf Children www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15...

Wow what a fantastic new opportunity for students in #CSD to learn #ASL and #deaf culture at Penn State! great news!! 🙌🏻@pennstateuniv.bsky.social hhd.psu.edu/csd/minor/asl

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Congratulations to Dr. Brennan @neurivulets.bsky.social for successfully delivering a PhD baby yesterday! What a delightful presentation and impactful research on neural networks for ASL. In words of @kemmorey.bsky.social “Brennan sets the bar for quality of research high!”

On stage now: Josh Tenenbaum asks how AI can mirror human cognition and what cognitive science can offer AI in return. #CogSci2025 #AI Watch live: underline.io/events/489/m...

If you are also worried about ScienceDirect’s AI slop feature, you can directly contact them here: service.elsevier.com/app/answers/...

I have sent ScienceDirect the following questions and asked them to take down their harmful AI feature. Let’s see what they answer.

Here’s our CEO’s statement. Factually, I just want people to understand that you can still help a lot if this is something you care about. And because at this very hard moment I am not in a position to answer for the network, I’m going to keep this closed. (3/3) www.npr.org/2025/08/01/g...

Listening-related fatigue disproportionately impacts deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) individuals, especially those who rely on lipreading or have had limited early access to ASL. 🔍 In a survey of 152 DHH adults, we found:

In this BSL video summary, Kearsy Cormier revisits our highly cited 2015 paper on constructed action in British Sign Language (BSL), co-authored with Sandra Smith & @zedsehyr.bsky.social What is constructed action, you ask?

BREAKING: A federal judge reversed National Institutes of Health's terminations of hundreds of critical research grants that were canceled because of their alleged connection to disfavored topics, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity. This is a major win for public health.

Cutting NIH or NSF funding sounds abstract. Seeing what research is actually being cut makes it real. Kudos to @nytimes.com for this piece: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Linguists & linguistically minded friends! If you are interested in how signs are organized in the mind, consider joining new seminar series "The Signing Mind" hosted by researchers at @bcbl.bsky.social + IDGS Hamburg University. The first seminar is 5/19 5pm CEST sites.google.com/view/signing...

Absolutely devastating news: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

Research briefs from VL2 open access! Perfect Friday reading! Quality science 🤓😍

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American Psychological Association speaks up after NSF terminates 1,000+ grants! “By halting research of this type we risk denying individuals high-quality care based solely on their heritage or background..our ability to understand & deliver effective services to ALL Americans..will be diminished”

How can we work together to promote the importance of science and its benefits? Here is an idea:

Science Homecoming is in the news today, talking about our mission and results 🧪🏠 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Even if you don’t have a disability, you likely know someone who does, a loved one or a dear friend perhaps. Consider deeply the harm such a registry can lead to if we allow this.

A fantastic post by @erinecampbell.bsky.social who led our recent project examining the relationship between form and meaning in language on a large scale. Paper out now in @pnas.org

Watch #science butchery and bloodshed unfold. By the way, the word “woman” is banned from federally funded research. I guess we now gain insights about menstrual and reproductive health from studying men.

The Spark Society appreciates your support. Thank you all for your donations. In addition to donations, I encourage those who study animal or human cognition to become a member of the Spark Society. If you support diverse voices and building inclusive spaces in Cognitive Psy/Sci, you belong!

New paper out at @openmindjournal.bsky.social!! We studied early vocab in deaf, hearing, blind, and sighted children in order to learn how sensory access (vision 👀, hearing 👂) and linguistic experiences shape how children learn words... Read on for a quick summary! 1/N

There is lots of valuable expertise and cultural capital deaf people bring to scientific advances. Today, the Deaf scientific community is under threat: Four of 5 NIH-funded programs supporting Deaf scientists have been cut, more to come.

Our new study challenges the long-held belief that language is arbitrary; there is no link between how words sound and what they mean. In ASL, many signs visually resemble their meaning. We find that this iconicity plays a key role in how signs are organized in the mind. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

SCOOP: You've heard about the NIH terminating grants. I've learned of another, less visible way it's disrupting science: It’s removing some applications from peer review. Not rejecting them, but putting them on hold without saying why or if they'll ever be reviewed. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

🚨Exciting news! Our CSD grad student has been selected as a 2025–26 Language First Student Ambassador! 👏 Jenna joined my lab last Fall as an RA on a predictive sentence reading project in DHH readers. So proud of her! #CSD #ASLbilingualism #LanguageFirst www.claplab.org/news

An important position statement from Gallaudet University Department of linguistics

🚨🚨🚨 I'm hiring a Postdoc for a 3-year position to come work with me at the University of Oslo using iterative learning experiments to understand the evolution of sound symbolism. Please share widely. 🔴 Deadline is May 31st '25 ⏲️ Desired starting date is Fall '25 shorturl.at/vSTZx

Here are six examples of how foreign visitors to the US with no criminal record are being treated: 1. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holding student with no criminal record married to an American is abducted by ICE and is still in detention over a week later. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/n... ......

Good move by wealthier universities, but will this work in practice? And could this even further penalize smaller, less wealthy universities? www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/u...

I’m a biomedical researcher who lost his wife to cancer. Finding cures is personal to me. What’s happening at the NIH is devastating. Here’s my editorial in my hometown newspaper. www.vindy.com/opinion/edit...

No one is safe

Although cochlear implants can give deaf children access to sound, it doesn’t always mean they have unrestricted or consistent access to language. This Science paper and podcast episode discuss how sign language can provide this access: pca.st/episode/5e7f... www.science.org/content/arti...

I don't use Twitch. Reuters is streaming it with decent audio. www.youtube.com/live/KxeaXm7...

“If the USA didn’t need an official language for 200 years, why do they need one now?” Here are some very good reasons why Official English is a terrible idea for the United States, from @lingsocam.bsky.social www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...

😭 Hamilton cancels North American tour stop at Kennedy Center – following Trump’s takeover www.whatsonstage.com/news/hamilto...

AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds www.bbc.com/news/art...

Reflections on science under autocracy, from one who remembers what it was like working in the former East Germany and Soviet Union substack.com/home/post/p-... by @vkempe.bsky.social