Thanks to the National Science Foundation for featuring our new @pnas.org paper, and for the continued support for basic science projects like this one!

We’re recruiting a full-time lab manager to join the Shared Minds Lab at USC! This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to get hands-on experience with research before starting a PhD program in psychology or neuroscience. More below:

Since many are starting grad school soon, let me re-share my One Big Tip™️ for research! Research involves many skills - collaborating, writing, presenting, etc. But many of these skills can be unified under a single overarching ability: theory of mind Blog post link in reply

Two lectures down, three to go in this week's Analytical Connectionism summer school. Today we tackle the sometimes feisty subject of how children acquire grammar. So many myths & misconceptions out there, I'm gonna start with theories &frameworks www.analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/

Tomorrow, I head to beautiful Gothenburg, Sweden, to lecture at Analytical Connectionism (www.analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/). In a shocking turn of events, I will talk about controlled rearing -- a topic I have never before presented!

I did not bring a poster to the Analytical Connectionism summer school, but at least I can do some live reporting 🙂‍↕️

It was really fun working with Guy to defend our views about practice-based aesthetic normativity! This whole co-authorship thing turns out to be pretty great.

British Journal of Aesthetics@britjaesth.bsky.social · 3w ago

Guy Rohrbaugh and Robbie Kubala team up to challenge Yili Zhou's account of the norms of score-compliance in our latest advance article. doi.org/10.1093/aest... #philsky

What an amazing resource! Idan continues to produce amazing pedagogical material 🙏

Iban Dlank (b↔︎d)@ibandlank.bsky.social · 2w ago

New resource: intro workshop on contextual embeddings in Language Models! Free, standalone Google Colab notebook with lots of explanations. Built for psycholing/cogsci folks (and anyone curious about LM internals). No coding required! Just edit-and-run. 🧵 github.com/idanblank/LM...

I'm very happy to share that I'll be joining @bergelsonlab.bsky.social at Harvard as a postdoc in September!! We'll work on how babies learn word meanings, and tons more!

Excited to share a preprint of work done in collaboration with @emilynguist.bsky.social ! osf.io/preprints/ps... TLDR: some effect sizes are larger in lab than on web-based platforms. So when evaluating quantitative predictions, considering the testing platform can be important! 1/n

What should we make of recent language model advancements in mathematics? In my new post, I reflect on long-standing cognitive debates about symbols and neural networks in light of this progress. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/symbols-ne...

Symbols, neural networks, and mathematical intelligence

Some reflections on connectionism and the basis of higher-level cognition

infinitefaculty.substack.com

Do language models know who did what to whom? Led by grad student @josephdenning.bsky.social, and Hannah Guo (when she was the first undergrad RA in the lab!)

Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?

Abstract. Language models (LMs) are commonly criticized for not “understanding” language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing. H...

direct.mit.edu

was listening to "Riptide" by Vance Joy and my brain inflicted this on me so now you have to see it too

Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social concludes the symposium with ‘Linguistic Efficiency and Linguistic Interpretability’, connecting efficient linguistic representations with the internal mechanisms learned by large language models. #CogSci2026

Sasha will be in Rio or Rio, or Rio or Rio! Chat with him — he’s been working on a lot of cool stuff!

Sasha Boguraev@sashaboguraev.bsky.social · last mo.

I’ll be in Rio this week to present this at CogSci! Excited to talk about what the study of LM interp (and LMs more broadly!) can contribute to studies of Cognitive Science and Linguistic Theory. Reach out if you’d like to chat!

How do children learn new words? Do they simply track word-object co-occurrences across contexts, or do they also use information about what speakers know and intend? With @mzettersten.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, I tackled this question in our new preprint! 1/🧵👇 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited that our paper on minimal translation pairs for ASL was recognized with a best paper award at the Workshop on Generative AI for Sign Language @ CVPR 2026! Congrats to my co-authors @skarabuklu.bsky.social, Shester, Diane, Greg, and Karen! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.27232

“Whoever loses this is going to be dejected and absolutely irate” — amazing commentary 🙏

clauding my way to a functional minicons documentation website!

How does knowledge learned from language alone interact with that learned from extra-linguistic modalities? Come find out our case study on cross modal generalization of semantic categories @ Coronado, poster C2, 11-12:30!! #ACL2026

Kanishka Misra@kanishka.bsky.social · 5mo ago

To appear in ACL 2026 main -- congrats to Tianyang on her first PhD project! Check out our preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 to understand the interplay between representations from language (alone) vs. from extra-linguistic input (for category membership)

Adele is too kind to attribute this to me but this really comes from her own 1995 constructions book, as well as John Beavers’ work and Beth Levin’s papers!

CoNLL 2026@conll-conf.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Speakers make choices when they use constructions, and these are grounded in differences in meaning (e.g. the direct object vs. prepositional object cxns, courtesy of @kanishka.bsky.social).

Doing my first ever conf-workshop keynote at the computational developmental linguistics workshop (comp-dev-ling.github.io)! Come one, come all!

The full BBS treatment from me and @futrell.bsky.social on "How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the LMs" is now out, with all the commentaries and our response. If you "Save PDF", it will give you the whole target article + commentary + response pdf: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Check out our #ACL2026 Oral paper 🗣️🤖 How do MLMs ground word usage through interactions with the physical and social world? Taking a classical human communication paradigm, we compare 7 MLMs with humans. doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.84

Using Perspectival Words Is Harder Than Vocabulary Words for Humans —and Even More So for Multimodal Language Models

Dota Tianai Dong, Yifan Luo, Po-Ya Angela Wang, Asli Ozyurek, Paula Rubio-Fernandez. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 20...

doi.org

First the US has to play two teams in the same game, then they drop to 10 men! Terrible!

🐸 New position paper on compositionality! 🐸 I synthesize my thoughts about the proper role/interpretation of behavior and mechanism in asking the question "Is this system (mind or machine) exhibiting compositionality?"

Come join @lindiatjuatja.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social, @jessyjli.bsky.social, and me at UT Linguistics! Lindia and I will be around at ACL in SD, and Kyle and Jessy will be with us in spirit!🤘 My lab: kanishka.website/lab/

KOALAB | Kanishka Misra

KOALAB — a community of linguists, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists studying how abstractions emerge in language learners.

kanishka.website

Lindia Tjuatja@lindiatjuatja.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I will be at #ACL2026 from July 2-7! Along with checking out the conference and hanging around SD, I'm also ✨recruiting students for Fall 2027 @ UT Austin Linguistics (along with @kanishka.bsky.social )✨ Some topics I'm really excited about below ⬇️

I will be at #ACL2026 from July 2--7! I will be giving a keynote at CDL workshop on controlled rearing and hypothesis generation from language models! Tianyang Xu (first author) and I will present work on cross-modal generalization in VLMs on July 7! Paper: aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...

A brief history of Open Mind 2013: Dick Aslin was disillusioned with Cognition (Elsevier). Nick Lindsay (MIT Press) wanted to create an open access cognitive science journal Nick contacted Dick, and Open Mind started. Editorial, February 2017, issue 1 of Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Editorial

I am extremely pleased that Open Mind has gone from concept to reality with this inaugural issue of our first volume. It has been a long road. Nick Lindsay at MIT Press had a vision for creating an op...

direct.mit.edu