🚨New paper🚨 about accented speech perception doi.org/10.1016/j.ba... by brilliant (MSc student at the time!) Amir Ghooch Kanloo accompanied by myself, Kazuya Saito and @adamtierney.bsky.social from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social 🧵1/5

ECR looking for a change in the New Year? We are recruiting a new Lecturer in Psychology at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social ! If you’d like to talk about life in the Department, please do feel free to get in touch. Deadline 8th Feb - More details below 👇 cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

New preprint by Mika Nash and others on how selective attention affects neural tracking of prediction during ecologically valid music listening: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📄 New paper out! It’s long been known that listeners reweight acoustic cues in speech when cue reliability changes. Here @adamtierney.bsky.social, Kyle Jasmin, and I show that this can happen instantly after a single exposure to 'accented' speech. tinyurl.com/mwt6usdw @rhulpsychology.bsky.social

New paper 🚨! Our class project on Illusions of the Mind: Laurel vs. Yanny and Sometimes Behave So Strangely #speech2songillusion now out www.nature.com/articles/s41... with 3 undergrad, 2 postgrad, & 1 postdoc, & 3 PI authors #musicscience

📣cog neuro postdoc opportunity! Interested in studying attention & exploration w/ cutting edge M/EEG? 🧠care about making vision science a bit more naturalistic? 🌱LandauLab is hiring! We seek resourceful, curious and creative researchers who can join the newly forming London-based [email protected]! ...

The kid has started calling me “cool dad” whenever he wants something. This is startlingly effective emotional manipulation

New *Funded PhD opportunity* for UK students to work with me at UCL (London), researching auditory training interventions to improve speech understanding in noisy environments. Deadline 28th April. Full details and job description: bit.ly/4ccbbzj @uclpals.bsky.social [please share]

There's a PhD studentship opportunity available at the Birkbeck School of Psychological Sciences! 4 years, funded by working as a graduate teaching assistant. Feel free to get in touch if you have questions. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMD691/p...

Having a kid really drives home how we're all linguistically complacent, settling for mediocrity when we should be innovating to realize the full potential of language. Anyway he called baby ducks "ducklets" this morning and I'd like to request that we all switch to that from now on

New preprint! Musical aptitude and experience, pitch discrimination, and neural encoding of speech harmonics are linked to the ability to perceive prosody in Mandarin-accented speech. Led by Amir Hossein Ghooch Kanloo (his MSc dissertation!) osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! Do individuals with musical anhedonia perceive illusory speech in song? Sort of! They rate all speech stimuli as less musical than controls, but hear increased musicality with repetition. And they don't like hearing speech, whether or not it transforms into song. osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! Listeners adjust their speech perception strategies after a single "accented" speech trial. However, these shifts in strategy vanish as quickly as they appear, lasting a single trial before returning to baseline. With @ashleysymons.bsky.social and Kyle Jasmin. osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! When listeners’ predictions about upcoming speech sounds fail, the subjective passage of time slows down. This suggests that people make linguistic predictions even when ignoring speech and prediction errors capture attention. osf.io/preprints/ps...

⏰CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS⏰ We're looking for London-based #participants who would like to take part in an fMRI study and gain insight into how our brains process second language speech 🧠🧠🧠 #auditory #neuroscience @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social Contact @mkachlicka.bsky.social for details. Please share!

New preprint! This paper shows that the perceptual boundary between speech and song can shift due to the surrounding context. Specifically, speech/song categorization is affected by contrastive adaptation: perceptual movement away from the previous stimulus. osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! We find grid-like coding in entorhinal cortex when participants complete a task requiring mental manipulation of the frequency and duration of sounds. This suggests that people use spatial circuits when thinking about sound. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!) royalsociety.org/grants/newto...

In trying to fix scientific publishing, maybe we could start with the small things? Like, say, counting work days instead of seven days a week when calculating review deadlines? I'm really sick of being told a review is due on Christmas, or on a Sunday

No drum in existence makes a sound that even remotely resembles “pa rum pa pum pum”. What drum can produce a nasal consonant? Drums do not have a nasal cavity. What kind of horribly cursed drum are we talking about here and why is it tormenting that baby

It's odd how strong the taboo is against certain stylistic elements in scientific writing. For example, I don't think I've ever read a scientific paper that contained an exclamation point! Or ellipses... What if I dared include them? Would an exclamation point doom an otherwise publishable paper???

Excited to inaugurate my bluesky presence with this exciting preprint! Lead by the one and only Maya Inbar and together w Eitan Grossman we investigated temporal structure of prosodic units in over forty languages. Check out what we found! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm very grateful to my wife for helping me set up tierney.science, which I think really encapsulates my scientific philosophy

New preprint by @mkachlicka.bsky.social et al.! Perceptual strategies set by one's first language can make learning a second language difficult. Can short-term training change participants' strategies, potentially facilitating second language learning? The answer is sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...

As someone who’s shy about dancing, it’s basically my worst nightmare that our toddler makes us dance for hours every night. “Dance, daddy! DANCE.”

Am I the last person on earth who writes out references by hand? By which I mean type them out, but if I'm going to be that much of a neo-Luddite, maybe I should go Full Quill Pen

My number one writing tip is very simple: read your entire paper/grant proposal out loud just before you submit. Every time I do this I initially feel silly but then catch a dozen embarrassing errors. Writing is captured speech, so if you stumble over a passage when reading, something's wrong.

It's a bit odd that musical aptitude is commonly measured by asking listeners whether two musical sequences are the same. That's not something musicians do very often! If you'd like to instead measure melody/rhythm reproduction we've made open-source tests in Javascript/HTML: tinyurl.com/musRepro

Cool snail on York city walls. I don’t usually post snails but I had to make an exception for this one

New blogpost: deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/11/why-...

There's a lecturer position open in the School of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck: cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/lect... I'm happy to answer any questions. In particular, if you're in the US and thinking of moving (for... some reason), I could share my perspective (I took that leap ten years ago).

One thing I find surprising about my toddler's language development is how quickly chance errors get set in stone. For example, a couple of months ago he said "tangles" instead of "candles", and he has ever since refused to say "candles" no matter how many times we model the correct pronunciation

I wish Bluesky would make it easier to share audio. I guess the best way to do this now is to take the sound file and dump it into a dummy movie file but that was just enough work that I deleted the fun post about an unpublished sound illusion I was going to write. Now all that's left is this gripe

Does anyone else feel like they have a special Voice they do when lecturing? Not intentionally, but involuntarily? Mine sort of sounds like Zapp Brannigan, or like I'm narrating a science documentary from the 1950s

One of my strongest opinions as a scientist--as a person--is that every acronym you use is a step away from understanding. Using an acronym is bad enough, but inventing one is a sin. Stop making me flip back to the beginning of your paper to understand what BPPMPPS means

Hi new followers! Here are a few recent papers from the lab: @mkachlicka.bsky.social shows that Illusory transformation of speech into song is unaffected by language background, suggesting cross-cultural similarity in cues used to distinguish speech and music: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Do you want to know more about our research? Check our website: sites.google.com/view/audione... and follow us here! 🦋 #research #auditory #neuroscience

Some relevant news from the recently held @btscon.bsky.social: Yuto Ozaki presented a talk titled: “Global collaboration in exploring cross-cultural acoustic regularities between music and spoken language”. See the recording below 📼 www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKdl...

I am seeking PhD students to join my new lab at Cornell! Work with me at @co3lab.bsky.social on perception and internal representations, cultural evolution, large scale online experiments, cross cultural experiments or computational music cognition. Please contact me ASAP if you are interested!

Our "Many Voices" 75-author collaboration led by Yuto Ozaki finding global regularities in music-speech relationships is now out on the cover of Science Advances: science.org/doi/10.1126/... Full video of 18 coauthors singing/speaking in our own languages at youtu.be/a4eNNrdcfDM