🎓 We have two new PhDs in #BCBL! Jiaqi Mao and Wai Leung Wong have successfully defended their PhD thesis. Congratulations! 🤩

If you're in Lisbon for @eurosla.bsky.social go see @brianwwl.bsky.social 's poster tomorrow morning: 490 - Beyond Frequency: Age-Dependent Sensitivity to Neighbourhood Density and Phonological Distinctiveness in L2 Vocabulary Learning and Lexical Access

📣 New paper in Scientific Reports Does speech perception consistency help us process spoken words more efficiently? With @effiekapnoula.bsky.social and Arthur Samuel, we found that consistency facilitates early lexical activation. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

📢 New paper in Neuropsychologia Do children with dyslexia show differences in neural adaptation or MMN? In an EEG roving paradigm, we found no clear differences between children with and without dyslexia. 🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

📢 New paper in JEP:HPP Speech perception gradiency (sensitivity to fine-grained phonetic detail) has been shown to enhance speech perception flexibility (recovery from misleading information) in L1 English. But does it play the same role in L2? doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... @bcbl.bsky.social

📖5th #iWORDD this October: 2 days of reading & dyslexia research, 1 on real-world impact! Join our outstanding keynote line-up + share your work here by April 15: shorturl.at/lSlBI @jyeatman.bsky.social @gaablab.bsky.social @drmluciano.bsky.social @standehaene.bsky.social @cassandrapw.bsky.social

Happy to be a collaborator on this new work by first-author Xin Huang from Urs Maurer's lab. In two combined eye-tracking/EEG experiments, we asked whether rapidly processed magnocellular (M-pathway) information in parafoveal vision plays a special role for word recognition in natural reading. (1/2)

I’m at #Psychonomics in Denver! Come by my poster (I-102) on distributional learning effects in bilingual speech perception! #psynom25

While the first year of life is crucial for language development, our team found that sound categorization continues to develop throughout the early school years. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Longitudinal Changes in the Structure of Speech Categorization Across School Age Years: Children Become More Gradient and More Consistent

A critical aspect of spoken language development is learning to categorize the sounds of the child's language(s). This process was thought to develop early during infancy to set the stage for the la...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

The Spoken Language group @bcbl.bsky.social is currently recruiting for these positions: 👉PhD students (expressions of interest are welcome on a rolling basis) 👉Postdoctoral Researcher (start date: Nov '26 - Sep '27) tinyurl.com/3um3bjze 👉Research Assistant tinyurl.com/y5uebra6 Please share ☺️

The Speech, Sign, and Systems Lab (formerly VoiceLab) is seeking motivated PhD students to join us in Fall 2026! We are part of the University of Iowa’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, consistently ranked among the top 5 programs in speech sciences nationwide.

📢PhD fellowships The Spoken Language group at #BCBL (Spain) offers sponsorship for the #INPhINIT Predoctoral Fellowships Potential PhD projects can be related to: 🗣️Speech perception 🧠Language learning ℹ️Info about the position and application process: tinyurl.com/2kcfsjr3 📆Deadline: October 30

[2/2] They will present their scientific work in the oral session programme of the biennial conference organised by @escop.bsky.social .  Do not miss the full programme here 👇 https://www.escop2025.com/_files/ugd/0a7b35_2432f56c71f34bacb6793b9d180204e1.pdf

[1/2] 🔜 #BCBL researchers @brianwwl.bsky.social , Silvia Yang, @effiekapnoula.bsky.social  and Hadeel Ershaid have a prominent presence this week at #ESCOP2025 in #Sheffield.

In this study, we found that images provide a more salient modality (compared to orthography) for L2 learning - e.g., testing vocabulary in a different modality than that used in training led to a disadvantage, but not when trained with images! Such a great project and such a fun collaboration! 😀

Mat Cieśla@mciesla.bsky.social · last yr.

I am very excited to present our latest work on image and orthographic referent effects on L2 learning 🥳 #psycholinguistics #psychology www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

📢PhD fellowships in the Basque Country (Spain) The Spoken Language group at BCBL (Spain) aims to sponsor a Basque Govt. predoctoral fellow in the upcoming call Info about the group: www.bcbl.eu/en/research/... Info about the position and application process: shorturl.at/i3lhi

Phonetic Variability Leads to Gradient Speech Perception: https://osf.io/486gm

Please share with your networks that the 2nd ROLE Symposium will be held online on May 19th. More information is coming soon www.rolecollective.org/events/2nd-r... You can submit your abstracts by April 14th through this link docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I am thrilled to share our new paper which investigates the role of continuous measures in linguistic diversity research. We found that children who are exposed to more linguistic diversity (e.g., language, dialect, accent) are perceptually more flexible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Linguistic diversity shapes flexible speech perception in school age children - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Linguistic diversity shapes flexible speech perception in school age children

nature.com