The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

Durham's Dunagree Lab continues to be the most wonderful workplace. Thank you to @sheinalew.bsky.social, @chimpanzeve.bsky.social, @fhillemann.bsky.social, @amandinevisine.bsky.social and others not on Bluesky for the surprise baby shower today 🥹

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Aislinn Keogh @mandolinguist.bsky.social gave my new book to her mother to help her understand some of Aislinn's research area. Her mother is in a book-crochet group; she loved the book so much that she made a blanket (aka granny) square inspired by the book cover! This is so fantastic and touching!

Oh good, my preprint from nearly a year ago that had still not been post-moderated has now disappeared 🙃

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!

I am advertising 2 positions in language evolution with my group at ‪‪@dondersinst.bsky.social: 📢 Fully-funded PhD position (Robotics/AI 🤖) www.ru.nl/en/working-a... 📢 Postdoc position (Virtual Reality 🎮) www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Deadline for applications is August 14th. Please RT! :)

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

Me and @maisyhallam.bsky.social had fun at the museum yesterday! 😄🐒

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

The Edinburgh-Durham commute certainly has its advantages 😍

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 🧪

Very cool to have been involved with this, such a great opportunity to learn about contributing to open source software! ⌨️

Interested in the evolution of human language and in understanding the pressures that shape languages today? Come do a PhD with me! Fully funded PhD position available in my group @mpi-nl.bsky.social, application deadline June 2nd: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

Semantic extension in an artificial language experiment: participants conventionalise novel labels, then extend them to convey new meanings (metonymically and metaphorically) based on salient shared associations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Two Fully-Funded PhD positions at Auckland Uni! Come help us understand the past and future of global cultural and linguistic diversity. #linguistics #evolution #academia #phd www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Probably the best way I could think of to make this announcement: super excited to be joining Durham Uni in June as a postdoc/modeller on @sheinalew.bsky.social's new ERC grant, Children as Agents of Cultural Evolution. Looks like I'm going to fit right in 😍 #DungareeLab @durhamdcerc.bsky.social

🐳 UPCOMING BOOK ALERT 🐬 The Evolution of Cetacean Societies Edited by @darrencroft.bsky.social @andrewfoote.bsky.social @stephanielking.bsky.social and myself Preorder available now press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... #whale #dolphin #animalbehaviour

🚨🚨🚨 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

Hello, Bluesky! Pleased to share that my first public-press article, on the shifting debate over what makes human culture unique, was published today in @us.theconversation.com. I review recent literature suggesting that cultural open-endedness, not cumulative culture, is our true defining trait.

Very proud of this new paper w/ Cliodhna Hughes & Jenny Culbertson. We show people generalise silent gesture orders from the verb phrase to the prepositional phrase harmonically. This was Cliodhna’s undergraduate disseration (!) An extraordinary achievement. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Anybody would think I liked dogs and had just passed my viva... And they'd be right, both those things are true 🥳🐕🧑‍🎓 #PhDone

My new book, MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/PenguinRandomHouse) arrives 6/3! It tells the story of how we produce language & how talking shapes our lives in surprising ways. It's psyling for gen'l audiences! Info & preorders www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046/more-than-words-by-maryellen-macdonald-phd/

📣📣📣 Applications for the 2025 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!! Are you interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Early-career scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply! More info: disi.org

Celebrate innovation in digital research methods! Nominate an outstanding project for Best Novel Use of a Digital Method in the #CDCSPrizes. If it's breaking new ground in your discipline, we want to hear about it. Deadline for nominations: March 3rd edin.ac/3j3e1fr

New cultural evolution modelling paper with @bdecourson.bsky.social on @pnas.org! "Weak individual preferences stabilize culture" A quick 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So much casual sexism every time we go snowboarding. Today's episode... Sam: Two boards and one pair of boots please Staff guy (looking at me): What size boots? Sam: 9 please Staff guy (in his best child-directed speech): And you've got your own have you? No guy, I thought I'd just go barefoot 🙄

Ever worried about nonindependence and empty cells in linguistic typological databases? Our solution is out in Sci Data at doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Applications for the ninth summer school on statistical methods for linguistics and psychology close on April 1, 2025. Every year people contact me saying they missed the call, so here it is again :) vasishth.github.io/smlp2025/

Two days on, and it's starting to sink in that I've actually submitted my thesis. One step closer to Dr Keogh! 🎓

Extremely cool new work by my extremely cool supervisor!

Another music post! It was probably around 2016 when I first heard Sleeper, and it rapidly became one of my favourite albums of all time. Unfortunately, Kan had already disbanded by that time. So it was EXTREMELY FUCKING COOL to see them last night. Celtic Connections making magic happen!

Can culture evolve like biology does? For 50 years, researchers have explored how human behaviors, from music to language, adapt and pass between generations. Learn more in the blog post on the Special Feature, "Half a Century of Cultural Evolution," Here: www.pnas.org/post/update/....

Wow, this is Dope™️ (technical term)

JOB ALERT! Come work with me! 34-Month Postdoc Position here at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in my project "Paths to Polysemy" Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas... Please repost & share widely!

New preprint with my supervisors @simonkirby.bsky.social & Jenny Culbertson. Why are words so similar to each other? We provide computational + experimental evidence that lexicon structure is shaped by a trade-off between competing communicative pressures. Read all about it! 📜 osf.io/preprints/ps...

I used to post about music a lot on the other site, am I allowed to do that here? Because I saw the Grit Orchestra last night and I'm here to tell you that if you like really any genre of music you should probably go and see them. Martyn Bennett was truly a genius and it's a stunning tribute to him.

Excited to share that our BBS target article — "Children as agents of cultural adaptation" — is online & open for commentary! In it, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argue that children's peer cultures might play an important & understudied role in cultural adaptation. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

O Christmas drums O Christmas drums, how lovely are your drumsticks!

Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025

This comic is attacking me personally. via @phdcomics.bsky.social and with Alt-text.

I gave the last WIP talk of my PhD yesterday and just wanted to share the xkcd comic I made: a cautionary tale of getting excited about a "new" idea. Feat. @simonkirby.bsky.social's excellent advice + work that's definitely already been done by @sblldtrch.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social et al.

oh my god overleaf I DO NOT WANT AI WRITING INTEGRATION

⏳ ONE WEEK LEFT! ⏳ The extended deadline to submit your abstracts for #EHBEA2025 is FAST approaching: 🗓️ Mon 16 Dec, midnight (GMT)! Don’t miss this opportunity to present your work at Newcastle, April 14-17! 🌟 Submit now: ehbea2025.com @ehbea.bsky.social #BioAnth #CultEvo #EvPsych #Evosky

Very nice result. My takeaway: Zipf's law derives from individuals being efficient *for their immediate communicative goals*, rather than being efficient *for the language as a whole*. This distinction is critical to the cultural evolution of languages

Very cool work!

Exciting! I'll be teaching courses on regression and mixed effects modelling, null hypothesis testing, Bayesian statistics, and crowdsourcing data next semester, but there's tons of other interesting stuff on offer, check it out 👇

This seems like a good first thing for me to repost on this platform. A handy guide to what I'm doing with my life! Tag yourself: I'm "we taught a load of undergrads a made-up language, lol"