Gabriella Vigliocco

Congratulations! I remember you two writing it during the Ecobrain retreat!

𝗡𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻: 𝗠𝗮𝘅 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗸 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (𝗪𝟮)

An exciting opportunity for outstanding researchers ready to lead an independent research group and shape the future of multimodal language research.

Learn more and apply here: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

The Cortex special issue on Conceptual Knowledge, co-edited by Emiko Muraki (@emij.bsky.social), Richard Binney (@rjbinney.bsky.social), Penny Pexman (@pennypexman.bsky.social) and myself is still accepting submissions.

🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

📢 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

Deadline approaching (March 20), consider submitting!
The process is flexible to accommodate different situations:
- Hybrid presentation mode
- Direct submission or via ARR
- Non-archival option: present work that is (or will be) published elsewhere
- Short (4 pages) or long (8 pages) papers

To take your mind off the news we have a competition to celebrate the publication of the 'Word Aware Concepts Assessment'. If you work with children in Early Years then this is for you!
Book details: www.routledge.com/Word-Aware-C...
Competition: forms.gle/oJQiAL8vks7g...
@lang4think.bsky.social

there are striking similarities between what we find for adults here and what we find in children (3-4 yo) word learning, see: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Both verbal and non-verbal behaviours impacted learning, modulated by learner’s individual differences. Learning of names and semantic features was supported by
different verbal factors, but meaningful gestures showed robust effects across both (points somewhat too).

Adults learn the name and semantic information about unknown objects during informal conversation. We look at verbal and non-verbal predictors separately for label and concept learning and we find..

Which verbal and non-verbal behaviours used by ‘teachers’ support adults’ learning during everyday conversations? We know a bit about how caregivers’ behaviours impact children’s learning, but what about adult learners? Here we use the ECOLANG corpus and...

*Preprint*! "Verbal and non-verbal teaching behaviours jointly shape adult learning in naturalistic conversation" by @chedwards.bsky.social; Francesco Cabiddu et al: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

The plot shows the relationship between gesture-speech latencies and word familiarity to the child (indexed by frequency in a corpus of young children TV subtitles)

... the timing relates to the child's familiarity with the word: for more familiar words, the gesture precedes, for less familiar words it is synchronous or comes later. This contrast to ADL findings where gestures for more familiar words tend to be more synchronous

Distribution of gesture-speech timings

Using data from ECOLANG, we found that in child-directed language (CDL), just like in adult-directed language (ADL), iconic gestures (onset and stroke) tend to be produced before the word associated to the gesture. HOWEVER...

*Preprint*: Pedagogy in the speech-gesture couplings of caregivers: Evidence from a corpus-based analysis by @marinewang.bsky.social, @eddonnellan.bsky.social and myself: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Saturday’s ‘planetary parade’ is a must-see for stargazers. Here’s how to watch it This weekend offers a chance to see a rare celestial event—Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all aligned in the sky like beads on a string

This weekend offers a chance to see a rare celestial event—Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all aligned in the sky like beads on a string

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

🚨 New Paper: How can AI help us understand child lang dev? If we train models on children’s environment, they can tell us if this environment support learning.
E.g., models tested child linguistic input (Huebner et al.) and visual input (Vong et al.).

What about Social Interaction? (a thread 🧵)

Does verbal (lexical, semantic) alignment btw caregiver and child support learning in 3-4 years old?

Come for a visit if you want to do it 🙃!

Congratulations looks very interesting! Wonder if same pattern obtains in larger corpus like Ecolang

Chances are you have not heard her name, but Marcelle Lapicque may have been the first Black woman neuroscientist in Europe.

By @avaskham.bsky.social, @rebeccasky.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/history-of-n...

The GaMMA corpus of Danish polyadic conversations with gaze speech and motion data in quiet and noise
www.nature.com/articles/s41... corpus captures polyadic conversations of native Danish speakers quiet & cocktail party conditions-> 11 groups of 4 normal-hearing people data doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle rather than an afterthought, writes @suthanalab.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

Newborn Infants Selectively Attend to Points That Refer to Objects Recognizing that certain acts are communicative is a key requirement of the development of communicative skills. Newborn infants have been shown to selectively respond to certain ostensive cues, incl...

This is great. I love to see evidence for 'factory settings' of cognitive mechanisms that enable learning.
Newborn Infants Selectively Attend to Points That Refer to Objects - Geraci - 2026 - Developmental Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I am so excited to get this!!

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Group photograph of faculty and participants of the very first Cold Spring Harbor summer course on Genetics and Neurobiology of Language in 2014, taken as the sun was going down at the Banbury Campus, Lloyd Harbor.

Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk