New paper by Alvin W. M. Tan, Kirsten Read, Sophia Gamboa, Janet Bang, and @vmarchman.bsky.social showing text in children's books is lexically and grammatically richer than spontaneous child-directed speech. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...
If you’re at #cogsci2026, please come see presentations by some of the great folks collaborating with the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford!
Really excited about this new preprint spearheaded by @vboyce.bsky.social w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social and the Peekbank team. It's a deep-dive into a large looking-while-listening dataset (>3000 children!), evaluating what analytic and design choices really matter for measurement osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990
Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos ...
arxiv.org
How do you measure early language development in languages where you don't have word lists? New paper: Measuring children’s early vocabulary in low-resource languages using a Swadesh-style word list - led by @kachergis.bsky.social and @alvinwmtan.bsky.social osf.io/njm7d_v1
*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 25th to Stanford Psychology's 9th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info-session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: tinyurl.com/pathstophd2025
When people form conventions in reference games, how easy are they for outsiders to interpret? (for values of "outsider" that include naïve humans and vision-language models) Check out @vboyce.bsky.social's poster today at #CogSci2025 to find out. paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/16c4...
Idiosyncratic but not opaque: Linguistic conventions formed in reference games are interpretable by naïve humans and vision–language models
Author(s): Boyce, Veronica; Prystawski, Ben; Tan, Alvin Wei Ming; Frank, Michael C. | Abstract: When are in-group linguistic conventions opaque to non-group members (teen slang like "rizz") or general...
escholarship.org
New #cogsci2025 paper! with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social In “Generics Revisited: Analyzing generalizations in children’s books and caregivers’ speech” we revisit the connection between generic use in children’s language input and psychological essentialism.
Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...
When I was finishing undergrad, I put together a short reader in the history and philosophy of linguistics. I've now ported it to Quarto Book and added a new chapter on computational approaches (along with other updates). Feedback is welcome! 😊 alvinwmtan.github.io/ling-approac...
Approaches to Linguistics
alvinwmtan.github.io
🚨Publication Alert!🚨 The ManyBabies4 paper is out! 37 labs around the world tested over 1,000 babies in the largest investigation of infants' social evaluation to date. doi.org/10.1111/desc...
Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study
Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluatio...
doi.org