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...

Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro! www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/

Very excited to have @juice500ml.bsky.social present his new work to our (D)NN-speech reading group this Thursday! Contact me or Kwanghee for the zoom link if you'd like to join virtually.

New open-access paper out in Cognition with Megha Sundara (UCLA) - "The acquisition of native language phonotactics: Integrating insights from machine learning, and adult and infant experiments" Link to paper: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... 🧵1/4

🧠🧪🧵1/37 Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

thank you @claudia-lopez.bsky.social for this clear and thoughtful coverage in @thetransmitter.bsky.social on some of our recent work on dynamic neural codes in speech processing! 🧠 🌀 ✨ www.thetransmitter.org/language/shi...

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

Our paper has been accepted to EACL 2026!🎉 We systematically evaluate several vision-language (VLMs) and language-only models, measuring their alignment with brain responses to concept words. Our results show that vision-language models offer a promising tool to model human concept processing

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues! A thread 🧵

If you're in the Netherlands or nearby, check out the Fourth Dutch Speech Tech Day. I'll be there. www.eventbrite.com/e/4th-dutch-...

'Tis the season to preprint BBS commentaries; I'm happy to share ours too! 🎄✨ The textual basis of current LLMs causes trouble, but linguistically relevant insights *can* be found in systems modelling the more natural form of human spoken language: the speech signal itself. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14506

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

New post! Last week I shared why I thought cognitive (neuro)science hasn’t contributed as much as one might hope to the design of AI systems; this week I'm sharing my thoughts on how methods and principles from these fields *have* been useful in my work. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/how-cognit...

I’m really enjoying the Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting in Utrecht! cpl2025.sites.uu.nl 🧠 Yesterday MSc student Sven Terpstra (co-supervised w/ @wzuidema.bsky.social) presented his project on predicting the N400 with GPT-derived metrics beyond surprisal openreview.net/forum?id=MAl...

'Tis the season to preprint BBS commentaries; I'm happy to share ours too! 🎄✨ The textual basis of current LLMs causes trouble, but linguistically relevant insights *can* be found in systems modelling the more natural form of human spoken language: the speech signal itself. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14506

Why do humans have linguistic intuition? And why should you care? A short thread about my new paper in @cadlin.bsky.social This work has the most original insight I've ever had, a genuinely new idea about the nature of language cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca... 1/20

Many studies of naturalistic comprehension report that surprisal (often LLM derived) explains more of the variance in data than other predictors. Why is this? And why can it be problematic for our conclusions? A 🧵 of takeaways from our paper doi.org/10.1007/s421... with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social

Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3

I had a wonderful time getting to know @gronlp.bsky.social last week while discussing linguistic structure and learning trajectories in speech models! ✨ Many thanks for the invite @frap98.bsky.social, already looking forward to catching up again soon :)

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social) Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanp

The Multilingual Minds & Machines Meetings call for abstracts is now open! Everything you need to know is here -> mmmm2026.github.io

happy to share our new paper, out now in Neuron! led by the incredible Yizhen Zhang, we explore how the brain segments continuous speech into word-forms and uses adaptive dynamics to code for relative time - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8

🌍Introducing BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data! LLMs learn from vastly more data than humans ever experience. BabyLM challenges this paradigm by focusing on developmentally plausible data We extend this effort to 45 new languages!

Interesting paper suggesting a mechanism for why in-context learning happens in LLMs. They show that LLMs implicitly apply an internal low-rank weight update adjusted by the context. It’s cheap (due to the low-rank) but effective for adapting the model’s behavior. #MLSky arxiv.org/abs/2507.16003

PhD Position: Accented Speech Processing - Apply now! Come work with Mirjam Broersma, @davidpeeters.bsky.social, and me at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University in the Netherlands. Application deadline: 19 October 2025 For more information, see www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Huge congrats to the envisionBOX team for the Open Science award nomination! 🎉 My tutorial on speech analysis tools in Python from the Unboxing Multimodality summer school (github.com/mdhk/unboxin...) is now also available at envisionbox.org Thanks for the invitation & this great initiative! 👏

The 𝗜𝗟𝗖𝗕 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 in Marseille went beyond all my expectations! 💯 A week has already flown by since I had one of the most formative experiences of my PhD so far. 👩‍🎨

✨ Do self-supervised speech models learn to encode language-specific linguistic features from their training data, or only more language-general acoustic correlates? At #Interspeech2025 we presented our new Wav2Vec2-NL model and SSL-NL evaluation dataset to test this! 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00981 ⬇️

Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍 For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

What a privilege to have #CCN2025 in (an exceptionally warm and sunny) Amsterdam this year! It was my first time attending the conference, and being surrounded by so many talented researchers whose interests are similar to mine has been a deeply enriching experience ✨

Huge congrats to @maithevannoort.bsky.social on her very popular poster! 🎉 She is now also on bluesky (and looking for a PhD position 👀)

So exciting, #CCN2025 in Amsterdam started today! We have stroopwafels!! Catch me at my poster on Friday to chat about the role of context in neural representational alignment to spoken language systems (C34) 🙌

 🔗 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=K...

I’m in hall X5 at board 3! See you there 🙌

Next week I’ll be in Vienna for my first *ACL conference! 🇦🇹✨ I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️ 🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)

Excited to announce the first workshop on CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models @ NeurIPS 2025! 📣 How can we interpret the algorithms and representations underlying complex behavior in deep learning models? 🌐 coginterp.github.io/neurips2025/ 1/4

ICYMI githistory.xyz is a great way to navigate #git commits and visualise how a file has been changing across commits Just replace github.com with github.githistory.xyz in the URL and enjoy! #rstats

The @interspeech.bsky.social early registration deadline is coming up in a few days! Want to learn how to analyze the inner workings of speech processing models? 🔍 Check out the programme for our tutorial: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter... & sign up through the conference registration form!

I am excited to announce that my paper "On the reliability of feature attribution methods for speech classification" has been accepted to #Interspeech2025! Co-authors: @hmohebbi.bsky.social, Arianna Bisazza, Afra Alishahi, @grzegorz.chrupala.me Find the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.16406

Next we jump from analyzing text models to predictive speech models! Phoneticists have claimed for decades that humans rely more on contextual cues when processing vowels compared to consonants. Turns out so do speech models!

An important read (🎁), shared for all the reasons. This is fascism.

Na viraal optreden op Koningsdag is The Space Choir nu ook in Amsterdam: ‘Zullen we ’m een keer als hooligans zingen? Echt F-side wil ik horen’

New postdoc positions at the (DISI-affiliated) Center for Possible Minds at Indiana University. Looking for scholars interested in interdisciplinary research on the nature of biological, artificial, and collective intelligence. Please share widely! indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/29547

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖 Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths? Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

I'm very pleased to share our latest study: ‘Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain’, by L Evanson, P Bourdillon et al: - Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... - Blog: ai.meta.com/blog/meta-fa... - Thread below 👇

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz