How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

science.org

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

Postdoc position @unimarburg.bsky.social in the project: "Bridging the Gap Between Verbal Psychological Theories & Formal Statistical Modeling with Large Language Models" (funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de) 📅Start: 01.10.2026 |⏳3 years 🔗 Job posting: uni-marburg.de/78NrWT Thanks for sharing!

"CLDF Meta" (meta.clld.org) links to data from over 800 CLDF datasets that have been released on Zenodo (e.g. WALS, APiCS and Grambank). There are links to data on over 9000 languoids, e.g. 98 entries on Ambulas (to take a random language). Great work by my colleague Johannes Englisch!

Scientists are asking if it might be unconscious

The Independent@the-independent.com · 2mo ago

Claude down: Anthropic AI not working in major outage

Multiplier par 15 les frais d’inscription universitaires des étudiant·es étrangèr·es non européen·nes. Piétiner l'égal accès aux services publics. Appeler le programme "Bienvenue en France" 🇫🇷🥖 🔴 Signez et faites signer la pétition, ça prend 2 min : petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/...

With big thanks to Alexey Koshevoy, @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social Marie Hallo @marie-hl.bsky.social and Rowan Hall Maudslay!

Alexey Koshevoy@alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6

New post: Tagging my blog with BERTopic and LLMs. I suspect as token costs increase, we'll see more blended traditional ML/LLM systems. And, in general, they work really well! vickiboykis.com/2026/05/18/t...

Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs

LLMs mean you still need a human in the loop, but in a different part

vickiboykis.com

🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6

Out today in @science.org: with the amazing Haochuan Cui, Yiling Lin, & @lingfeiwu.bsky.social, we analyzed 3.6 million scientists publishing 1960–2020. The findings reshape a century-old debate about age and scientific creativity.

Join us in Barcelona for a postdoc! We are looking for candidates with a strong NLP/ML/AI background and an interest in linguistic diversity and human and machine cognition: dub.sh/blasi_nlp_po...

“We have added an AI system to our service to make it more efficient.” The efficiency in question:

Lukasz Olejnik@lukaszolejnik.bsky.social · 4mo ago

For instance, instead of writing π or 3.14, one can now elegantly write E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(E(E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(E(1,E(E(1, …

I was preparing a seminar, and accidentally created some Mondrian-style plots:

That's a very cool game. I got 40.46, even though visually all of my colors were very much off.

William Ngiam | 严祥全@williamngiam.github.io · 4mo ago

Visual #workingmemory peeps, you're going to love this. This is super challenging - might give you pause on how we are measuring color memory... My color memory is a 40.4/50. Please do worse so I feel better. dialed.gg?c=3PCHDE

New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Zebra finches transform manipulated songs with shuffled syllables to exhibit linguistic laws - Animal Cognition

Animal Cognition - Linguistic laws are increasingly used as markers of efficiency in non-human communication, but it remains unclear how rapidly these patterns can emerge. In this re-analysis of...

link.springer.com

Interesting counterpoint to the arguments that LLMs capture linguistic complexity: "..model behavior is mainly driven by the richness of linguistic resources rather than by sensitivity to grammatical complexity, (thus) resembles human (language) only superficially." doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Community size rather than grammatical complexity better predicts Large Language Model accuracy in a novel Wug Test

The linguistic abilities of Large Language Models are a matter of ongoing debate. This study contributes to this discussion by investigating model performance in a morphological generalization task th...

journals.plos.org

New! For robust research, center values, not technology, w/ @nerdpro.bsky.social zenodo.org/records/1894... Our commentary on Futrell/Mahowald "How linguistics stopped worrying and learned to love the LMs”, forthcoming in BBS

a gpt in a sublime 200 lines of pure Python — it is all there. Incredible for teaching students (and yourself) karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/m...

Anita Slonimska@anitaslonimska.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New open-access paper with @asliozyurek.bsky.social & Emanuela Campisi We extend relevance theory to a multimodal view of language, demonstrating that speakers explicitly highlight iconic gestures as communicatively relevant in knowledge transmission context 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

Very interesting attempt to trace back the early evolution of a “system of conventional signs” (proto-writing system) 🧪✍️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs | PNAS

As humans, we store and share information. This allows us to distribute knowledge necessary for survival and to coordinate large groups. Our homini...

pnas.org

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

How far back in time can you understand English?

An experiment in language change

deadlanguagesociety.com

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Simon Fisher@profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 6mo ago

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Come work with the best advisor ever (speaking from experience here)!

Olivier Morin@oliviermorin.bsky.social · 6mo ago

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

Quick, now: which is bigger, 25234991 or 25234? Next: which is bigger, MMI or DCCCLXIV? Some numerical notations' conciseness indexes their magnitude well, some less so. But how does that matter cross-culturally for their adoption and retention? Check it out @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations | PNAS

More than 100 historically, archaeologically and ethnographically attested numerical notations have been used over the past 5,000 y; however, becau...

pnas.org

That's nice -- a very cool applied result.

Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 6mo ago

We coded our ~100k articles using LLMs. Should you believe them? To answer this, we benchmarked 4 human RAs against 3 LLMs on their ability to recover ground truth article data. Details in the paper and appendices, but the LLMs did well and handily beat the highly trained humans.

AI agents are becoming a serious threat to research data quality. Today we’re rolling out Bot authenticity checks on @joinprolific.bsky.social, detecting agentic AI with 100% accuracy in testing. Comes with a native Qualtrics integration! More info: www.prolific.com/resources/in...

What a cool resource! I am a bit to the left of where I would expect myself to be situated, but it is about right.

Theo Sanderson@theo.io · 6mo ago

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

I just discovered that you can bypass the synchronization limit on zotero by using Koofr (a very funny name btw) through webDAV. That way you can save up to 10gb of papers and read them on multiple devices for free! Finally I can use my 10-year old iPad for something useful!

BayesFlow to the people!

Mason Youngblood@masonyoungblood.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM