3-year-old: Daddy, can you teach me to roast marshmallows? Me: Of course, I'd be happy t- 3YO: Because when I grow up YOU'LL DIE

Briefly surfacing from mat leave to celebrate a new paper with @adamtierney.bsky.social, Fred Dick, and Lori Holt! We found that salient acoustic and linguistic features of task-irrelevant speech distort subjective time. Excited to see this work finally out there! psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...

This paper has something for everyone. Salience! Time perception! Linguistic surprisal! Synchronized tapping!

Ashley Symons@ashleysymons.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Briefly surfacing from mat leave to celebrate a new paper with @adamtierney.bsky.social, Fred Dick, and Lori Holt! We found that salient acoustic and linguistic features of task-irrelevant speech distort subjective time. Excited to see this work finally out there! psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...

🚨New paper🚨 about the link between cue weighting and dimension-selective attention doi.org/10.1016/j.co... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social Fred Dick, Kazuya Saito, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5 #neuroskyence #psychscisky

3rd🚨new paper🚨this year! Here we're looking at the effects of targeted training on how L2 learners weight perceptual cues doi.org/10.1017/S136... @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @ashleysymons.bsky.social, Yaoyao Ruan, Kazuya Saito, Fred Dick, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5

🚨New paper🚨about mechanisms underlying individual differences in cue weighting doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social, Kazuya Saito, Fred Dick, and @adamtierney.bsky.social #psychscisky #neuroskyence 🧵1/5

Early neural encoding of pitch drives cue weighting during speech perception

Abstract. Linguistic categories are conveyed in speech by several acoustic cues simultaneously, so listeners need to decide how to prioritize different potential sources of information. There are robu...

doi.org

🚨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...

Neural tracking of melodic prediction is pre-attentive

Music’s ability to modulate arousal and manipulate emotions relies upon formation and violation of predictions. Music is often used to modulate arousal and mood while individuals focus on other tasks,...

biorxiv.org

📄 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

Speech perception strategies shift instantly

To perceive speech listeners must decide how to prioritize information from multiple acoustic dimensions. Over the course of language learning, indivi…

tinyurl.com

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

Laurel–Yanny percept affects the speech-to-song illusion, but musical anhedonia does not - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Laurel–Yanny percept affects the speech-to-song illusion, but musical anhedonia does not

nature.com

📣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 team@ucl.ac.uk! ...

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

ucl.ac.uk

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]

Divisional Vacancies

Job Vacancies in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences

bit.ly

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...

PhD Studentship & Graduate Teaching Assistant at Birkbeck, University of London

Apply now for the PhD Studentship & Graduate Teaching Assistant role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

jobs.ac.uk

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...

Spatial coding supports auditory conceptual navigation

Grid cells in human entorhinal cortex encode spatial layouts for real-world navigation, yet their role in conceptual navigation remains unclear. Here we show that mentally transforming tones within a ...

biorxiv.org

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...

Newton International Fellowships | Royal Society

This fellowship is for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK.

royalsociety.org

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...

A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low frequency rhythms and balance cross-linguistic syllable rate variability

Intonation units (IUs) are a universal building-block of human speech. They are found cross-linguistically and are tied to important language functions such as the pacing of information in discourse a...

biorxiv.org

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...