So flattering that AI chose to target you! I recently got a podcast invitation that was clearly fake (the invitation and the podcast), also with no obvious motivation.
28.01.2026 18:48
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So flattering that AI chose to target you! I recently got a podcast invitation that was clearly fake (the invitation and the podcast), also with no obvious motivation.
Language folks, there's a coffee shop in Milwaukee called Discourse. Great to see the creative name (no mention of beans, grind, cups!) and prioritizing coffee with conversation! And bonus round: their affiliated cocktail bar is called Agency.
www.discourse.coffee
Picture of Matt Goldrick and text announcing his win of the Elman Prize for scientific achievement and community building
@mattgoldrick.bsky.social Matt, congratulations on the Elman Prize! This is so richly deserved!
Richly deserved, Matt! Congratulations!
There's good evidence that talking is declining. I explore the cognitive and social consequences of this shift in the Washington Post. wapo.st/4pz96CG
I'm very grateful that my book (Penguin Random House) was very carefully fact-checked and grammar checked and this-seems-confusing checked. Mistakes were made by me and caught by the wonderful checkers.
The Wisconsin component of the analysis here is revealing. Evidence is consistent with DOGE strategically delaying contract terminations in WI until after the 2025 state Supreme Court elections to mitigate electoral risk.
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...
I love that this guy's nickname is...his name. He's Drake "Drake Maye" Maye. It's the power of embedding!
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/24/s...
A year-end report on the poster's performance on the New York Times' Connections game
All my work on ambiguity resolution has finally paid off!
New job opening in social psychology at UW-Madison! at the associate prof level.
jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/associa...
A furnished dollhouse on 3 floors
Keyword censor fail: My husband posted his late mother’s doll house on a resale website. It got flagged as potential porn because the description contained the words mother, adult, child, doll, toy. Gotta do some creative rewording to both describe the 🏠 and evade the lame keyword flagging!
What's your dishtowel (DT) grammatical theory? Formalist: pristine DTs w strict DT-bar categories (hand v. dish use). Usage-based (me): well-worn DTs w wide scope. I once grabbed a DT to wipe up a messy spill in a Formalist kitchen & was judged ungrammatical: "Maryellen, we've got SPONGES for that!"
Here's me talking about talking on the Curious Minds at Work podcast. This one emphasizes how language production boosts learning & includes something I've been thinking a lot about: the potential consequences of young ppl talking less than in previous generations.
www.gayleallen.net/cm-305-marye...
This is at least partly contained in your #1 and 2, but worth spelling out: Clear about why the questions are interesting/important, and conveying that the approach to addressing them is novel, clever etc.
Yes. And then when you close the suitcase to prevent cat invasion, they sit on top of it. The cat prime directive is to seek a roughly cat-sized surface on top of another surface.
Black cat (Anna) on a freshly washed and folded blue-gray towel.
PSA: Put the laundry away after you fold it.
A white cat (Wyatt) hiding in a paper bag inside a box. His toy Squirrel (a finger puppet in a former life) lies nearby.
Your cat is obeying the prime directive: sit on a cat-ish sized surface on top of another surface. Extra points for rectangular surfaces, bags, and being half-on, half-off. Wyatt aims for a trifecta.
Definitely Language Game too!
Profs, consider reading a science trade book w undergrads in your lab! Ugrads may get lost in the specificity of a lab's research questions, and a book can provide a bigger picture. Suitable language books include my book & ones by @michaelerard.bsky.social, @juliesedivy.bsky.social, Viorica Marian
Yes, kids must read outside of school. Educators know this, sometimes tell parents/caregivers, who sometimes have the resources/interest/time to promote home reading. Estimates of kids' reading (aka print/text exposure) predict reading skill big time. One example from the research lit: rdcu.be/eJTI3
A subject-verb agreement error, right in the headline! A little irony here is that some of us analyzed patterns of these errors to argue against strict "Words and Rules" approaches to language use that were favored by...Well, iykyk @drlearnasaurus.bsky.social @heidilorimor.bsky.social
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?
Learning the moment-to-moment, fast-paced dance of turn-taking in conversation is tricky. Imme, Maartje, Middy and I show how 2 year old (Dutch) kids track pronoun use to predict who is gonna speak next in an interaction. Just published in JECP. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"The models are trained on three dialogue corpora in English and Japanese, where backchannels and fillers are preserved and annotated, to investigate how fine-tuning can help LMs learn their representations."
arxiv.org/abs/2509.20237
In a new paper, Mike Tanenhaus and I articulate the rationale behind different experimental tasks in the visual world paradigm and give recommendations for future studies. “Rethinking task importance in the Visual World Paradigm“ (Brain Research, in press). pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i...
Curious about the human ability to extract regularities from sensory input (i.e., “statistical learning”) and individual differences therein? #CognitiveScience #Learning
Our #Consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide 🌎 💬 🌍 💬 🌏 💬:
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Ah, the curse of interdisciplinarity. Also autocorrect.
New chapter on sentence production in "Speaking: The Free Book" bookdown.org/v_piai_resea... beautifully written by @drlearnasaurus.bsky.social Go check, very useful resource for free (!) for teaching & initiating folks on topic of language production (usually missing from textbooks on "language"!)
So fun to talk about talking with @kleonard.bsky.social of Chicago's The Second City Improv on the "Getting to Yes, And" Podcast. A wonderful discussion about the value of talking, listening, comedy, improvisation! On the podcast apps or here on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=MElx...