A picture of a humpback whale just below the sea surface taken by Marc Quintin
A thread explaining our new discovery about humpback whale song published today in Science... We found key statistical properties that characterise all human languages in another species for the first time. We have more in common with whales than we previously thought! doi.org/10.1126/scie...
OK, here is a very rough draft of a tutorial for #Bayesian #SEM using #brms for #rstats. It needs work, polish, has a lot of questions in it, and I need to add a references section. But, I think a lot of folk will find this useful, so.... jebyrnes.github.io/bayesian_sem... (use issues for comments!)
Exciting! @evfedorenko.bsky.social and coll. @natureportfolio.bsky.social (NatRevNeurosci)'s piece functionally separated a core lang network from a percept.-motor network (+others);
and asked for an evo perspective!
Here we go: s.gwdg.de/WUPS8h
(together with A.D. Friederici)
Check out @bkhmsi.bsky.social's summary of our new paper:
We identify "language network" units in LLMs using neuroscience approaches and show that ablating these units (but not random ones) drastically impair LLM language performance--moreover, these units better align with human brain data.
π¨A four-year making @naturehumbehav.bsky.social with @UmitKeles @markthornton.bsky.social @Ralph Adolphs
Across large sets of mental states, traits, situations, faces, & participants in five continentsπ
face impressions shape mental state attributions in various situations
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Comic depictions of the first page of research papers in the language sciences, with titles that include the following: Just what the hell is a word anyway? See how this single cognitive process or brain area or neural oscillation or gene explains language! Based on the shapes of these old bones, Homo erectus could sing .... don't @ me. A baby looked at one thing more than the other, now we know the secret to grammar. If you think about it, every language is fundamentally the same, amirite? We taught a load of undergrads a made-up language, lol. On the staggering diversity of the many languages across the world. Remember the thing you said only humans could do, here's a video of a monkey / dolphin / corvid / octopus / honeybee doing it. I trained this AI with 80 billion tweets and it became head-writer for phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
To accompany all those Bluesky science/academia #starterpacks, how about we also share introductions to the literature of our different fields. I present here a handy guide to main types of papers in the language sciences (inspired by the amazing @xkcd.com).
#language #linguistics #science #academia
(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...
π΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ Ώ Call for abstracts π΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ Ώ Edinburgh Linguistics & English Language Postgraduate Conference 2025
4-6 June 2025 @ University of Edinburgh
pgc.lel.ed.ac.uk/index.html
20-min talks + 10 mins Q&A !
