Do you like comic books and want to think more seriously about the linguistics of them? Are you a social scientist or a linguist who wants to know more about nation-building or language planning in fiction? HAVE I GOT EXACTLY THE ARTICLE YOU NEVER ASKED FOR, on CAMP Anthropology. 🐦🐦

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Artificial language learning experiments often explain typology by showing that more common patterns are easier to learn. But this isn’t always the case. In work I recently presented at SCiL, I present a possible explanation for one such mismatch between the lab and typology. 🐦🐦 #linguistics 1/6

My kingdom for a

Lots of great computational #linguistics in this year's SCiL proceedings! (Including an extended abstract from me that I'll probably post more about closer to the conference.) 🐦🐦 openpublishing.library.umass.edu/scil/

Linguists! Abstracts for the LSA annual meeting in NOLA in January 2026 are due on July 7! Please submit! It’s going to be a great conference, and a chance to confer and strategize. Would love love love to see you there! #linguistics @lingsocam.bsky.social www.lsadc.org/abstracts

Really nice example to bring up in a data science or corpus #linguistics class about dealing with weirdness in your data!

Look who I found outside my front door! 10/10, no room for improvement.

(reading the specs of a clown car) wow 32 cupholders

Humans do representation learning all the time and one of the most tangible aspects of representation learning (from a continuous physical space to mental representations) is human phonology. Submit to the Special Session at this year's AMP on modeling phonology with deep neural networks!

New article out on how infants learn to find affixes in early infancy! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

One thing that needs to get repeated until it sinks in is that “AI” does not simply function as a tool that people in power are using; it’s even more powerful as a permission structure for the destructive & extractive things they wanted to do in the first place.

Happy dog!

Baby tapir Ume had her first encounter with the water dish and it’s adorable! 🥰

The National Science Foundation cancelled over 60 grant review panels today, effectively grinding funding of new projects to a halt. The so-far indefinite pause comes as NSF grapples with the impact Trump's executive orders will have on their grantmaking process. www.npr.org/sections/sho...

It's one of the unwritten rules of civilization: if a child pours air into a cup and offers you tea, you will sip it and say "thank you, it's delicious."

wikipedia honestly gotta be top 5 human creations in the past thousand years

maybe my favourite etymology: the phrase “curry favour” originates from a medieval french morality poem about a conniving horse named fauvel who amasses a following of sycophantic humans to groom and tend to him. over time, “currying fauvel” eventually became “currying favour.”

The most epic and dangerous nursery Isisaurus from Prehistoric planet, study by me #paleoart #dinosaurs #sciart #procreate 🐡

bok choy is the perfect vegetable. easy to cook, delicious and easy to make more delicious. a perfect side! a perfect side.

She knows I'm taking a picture and she's NOT happy about it.

Hard to explain why, but there's something very cute about popcorn in a pickle jar.

Check out this cool paper! It's about patterns of phonological stress, but also (and more importantly) the complex relationship between representation and learning in theories of #linguistics when you're trying to explain typology.

This is true for my posts as well as my linguistics papers.

Label that should come with every stroller.

Brag post

"It's a cartoon about a team of superheroes" >Sure, what're their powers? "Their power is that they're sharks who walk on land" >That doesn't really seem like a-- "Chef Boyardee made pasta of them" >... "Also you ate the walking shark pasta out of a can." >[slowly walks away]

Just landed in Boston. Making sure to immerse myself in the local culture.

Three Kinds of Research xkcd.com/2977

Just googled "despicable me yellow guy" to remember the word "minion", if you're wondering where my brain is at.

Bonding with my toddler by engaging with the pop culture she enjoys most (ASMR videos of people eating candy)

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Don't have anything productive to post, so here's my dog 🐶

Genuinely unhealthy how many answers to this flooded into my mind 🐦🐦

Reposting this in case anyone needs stimuli for a #linguistics experiment...

I'll be teaching a fun new online course at UMass this fall! Data Science for #Linguistics will dive into how tools like statistics, machine learning, and data visualization can be used in language research. Anyone can enroll and you can sign up starting next week! www.umass.edu/universitypl...

Dog check

Just learned about the concept of recursive acronyms and I'm *not* happy about it.

my child when I read to him before nap: yawning, drooping, rubbing his eyes my child when I leave him in his crib in a dark quiet room: standing, walking, rolling, kicking, workshopping a monologue

Truly greatest of all time. Gone too soon.

Computational P-siders! Virginia Partridge, a data scientist/NLPer at UMass, just created a super cool Python package for converting between different transcription systems. If you think that'd be useful for you, it's pretty easy to install & you can check it out here: pypi.org/project/phon... 🐦🐦

Made some very aesthetically pleasing French toast recently 👨🏻‍🍳

This will also be my first ADS meeting! Excited to see how it goes! 🐦🐦

A grilled cheese is probably one of my favorite foods and it's wild how perfect this description of them is.

@bprickett.bsky.social is offering a new on-line computational linguistics course 12/18/23 to 01/31/14. It's a UMass course, and should presumably transfer. It has a prerequisite, but that can be waived if you have sufficient Python background. Sign up here: www.umass.edu/uww/class-en...

The toddler is going through a phase where she loves apples but isn't convinced they're edible. Just chews them up and spits them out like gum. Unclear how she would fare in a Garden-of-Eden scenario.

Realized yesterday that, for me, the past tense of Seven Eleven is "Sevened Elevened"

Sorting replies by how likely the person is to ask me how many languages I speak when they find out I'm a linguist

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