Maria Korochkina
@mariakna.bsky.social
VC's Research Prize Fellow (tenure-track) at Aston University. Researching language learning and use across the lifespan; enthusiastic about stats, philosophy of science, and improving learning outcomes through research. More at https://mariakna.github.io.
We still have places left for our upcoming workshop on Supporting Vocabulary in Secondary School! An opportunity to share current practice, build networks, discuss ideas, and shape future research. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/supporting... #secondaryschool #edchat #york #vocabulary #oracy #literacy
Loved @asifamajid.bsky.social's keynote at @teap2026.bsky.social on how stymying MASKing can be for how we think about the mind. Cognition never happens in a vacuum, and context belongs in our models, so it’s about time our research caught up.
Brilliant piece in tes by @bobeaglestone.bsky.social arguing that a simple tweak to GCSE English Lit could dramatically improve things. Really pleased to see our work with @mariakna.bsky.social on the difficult vocabulary in the spec cited. 👏 www.tes.com/magazine/tea...
How a small change to the English curriculum could cut teacher workload
Tweaking the requirement for GCSE students to read a 19th-century novel could add diversity while maintaining rigour and reducing teacher workload, argues Robert Eaglestone
tes.com
**New** validated Title Recognition and Author Recognition Tests to measure text experience in primary school children, with Holly Cooper, @mariakna.bsky.social, and Marc Brysbaert. #OA @qjep.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Assessing Text Experience in British Primary School Children: New Validated Title and Author Recognition Tests - Holly Cooper, Maria Korochkina, Marc Brysbaert, Kathleen Rastle, 2026
Becoming a skilled reader requires that children accumulate extensive experience with text through independent reading. Research shows that greater text experie...
journals.sagepub.com
**New** chapter on “Literacy” just published in the Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science. The whole series is super, accessible chapters and no paywalls, a great resource for teaching. oecs.mit.edu/pub/epclh9no...
Literacy
oecs.mit.edu
*New paper* in JML, in which we use a compositional distributional semantic model to show that, although morphological patterns are quasiregular, natural text contains enough structure for learning important aspects of affix meanings (open access): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Morphemes in the wild: Modelling affix learning from the noisy landscape of natural text
Morphological knowledge serves as a powerful heuristic for vocabulary growth and contributes significantly to the speed and efficiency of reading. Whi…
sciencedirect.com
Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...
A really nice commentary by Marc Brysbaert on how we might - and perhaps should - reframe our thinking about the relationship between psychology research and AI research: doi.org/10.1111/bjop...
<em>British Journal of Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library
In this commentary, I express my concern that the special issue focuses too much on the added value of AI for psychology, while psychological research also has much to offer, such as the operationali...
doi.org
*New paper* showing that adults’ morpheme knowledge in English is shaped by what readers can readily pick up from spelling, even when this means relying on cues that don’t accurately reflect morphological structure or overlooking informative exemplars doi.org/10.3758/s134...
Morpheme knowledge is shaped by information available through orthography - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
A large portion of words in a language are formed by combining smaller meaningful units called morphemes (e.g., teach + -er → teacher). Understanding a language’s morphology is vital for skilled readi...
doi.org
If we leave the acquisition of morphological knowledge to children's reading, what information is there in books to be acquired? @kathyrastle.bsky.social has answers (open). www.nature.com/articles/s41...
** New resource ** We analysed the characteristics of words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people. Properties of each word (frequencies, etc) are now available in an interactive website. cyp-lex.rastlelab.com
CYP-LEX
Discover what words children and young people encounter when they read
cyp-lex.rastlelab.com
What can children learn about morphology when they read for pleasure? We analysed the words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people to find out! Read the blog post here: www.rastlelab.com/post/what-ca...
What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun?
A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built — that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made u...
rastlelab.com
Just came across a super cool study on lexical elaboration measured using data from bilingual dictionaries: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... There is even an interactive app that lets you explore how various concepts are elaborated across languages (relative to English): charleskemp.com/code/lexical...
A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages | PNAS
Claims about lexical elaboration (e.g. Mongolian has many horse-related terms) are widespread in the scholarly and popular literature. Here, we sho...
doi.org
Column, on the prime minister who had room to manoeuvre and chose to besiege himself instead. Again. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Keir Starmer is caught in yet another trap of his own making | Rafael Behr
The prime minister’s immigration approach follows a now-familiar pattern: letting fear of a difficult argument get in the way of policy that might work, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr
theguardian.com
My study @surreypsychology.bsky.social @modilab-surrey.bsky.social is now live. Looking for typically developing children and children with #DCD / #Dyspraxia. If you are a #School in Surrey, we can come to your classroom, please get in touch! Please share widely 🙏
MoDI Lab@modilab-surrey.bsky.social · last yr.🚨Do you have a child between 9 and 11 years old? Are you interested in helping #Science and understanding why some children #move differently? Join our online study that has two parts, one for the parent, one for the child, 20-30 min each.🚨 For more info: surreyfahs.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
*New paper* out in npj Science of Learning! @kathyrastle.bsky.social and I take a deep dive into the fascinating intricacies of morphology and introduce a new account of how readers learn about the internal structure of words. Read it here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning - npj Science of Learning
npj Science of Learning - Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning
doi.org
Very important work led by the brilliant Anastasiya Lopukhina shows that widely publicised claims about subtitles helping children learn to read need to be tempered - just published in PsychScience: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Where Do Children Look When Watching Videos With Same-Language Subtitles? - Anastasiya Lopukhina, Walter J. B. van Heuven, Rebecca Crowley, Kathleen Rastle, 2025
Influential campaigns in the United Kingdom and the United States have argued that same-language television subtitles may help children learn to read. In this s...
journals.sagepub.com
Abandoning everything you stood for, just to not make fascist billionaires and anti-science crusaders uncomfortable - well done, @royalsociety.org - it takes talent to be SO utterly pathetic and cowardly. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk
Exclusive: Fellows argue Musk has violated code of conduct but council believes investigation ‘could do more harm than good’
theguardian.com
Our article (with @kathyrastle.bsky.social) on vocabulary in the English Lit GCSE is now out in The Use of English @englishassociation.bsky.social. We're very proud of this work and hopeful it contributes to GCSE reform for the benefit of pupils nationwide. Also available at doi.org/10.31219/osf....
Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
i've written a blog post about why I think we should reject generative AI in the university: languagemechanics.neocities.org/no-gen-ai
Language Mechanics: Language, Computers and Power
Yarden Katz. 2020. Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. Columbia University Press.
languagemechanics.neocities.org
Nina Markl 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈@ninamarkl.bsky.social · last yr.apropos of recent posts, I was invited to give a talk to my faculty about "social impacts of AI" on Monday and I have decided to stop being coy about it
This Friday 4pm is my professorial inaugural "From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong" (w/ BSL interpretation). There'll be a lot of iconicity in it! If you're interested, you can register for the webinar under this link: www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edac...
New blog post! Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly. So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost. www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...
Reviewer notes: Avoid any ambiguity about analysis aims
For any central statistical analysis that you report in your manuscript, it should be absolutely clear for readers why the analysis is being conducted in the first place – that is, the analysis goal s...
the100.ci
Now almost 450 signatories to my open letter calling on the @royalsociety.org to stand up for its values & deal with the widespread concerns raised by Elon Musk's Fellowship. Please consider signing & sharing: forms.gle/miDciq35oxyw... List of signatories here: occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2025/...
Open letter to the President of the Royal Society – time to stand up for your values
If you wish to show your support for the letter below regarding apparent inaction by the Royal Society in the face of breaches of its code of conduct by Elon Musk FRS, please sign below. I invite anyo...
forms.gle
Latest blogpost on Musk/Royal Society debacle: deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/02/seve... I look at the reasons that have been given for inaction, and find them wanting. @royalsociety.org
Seven reasons for keeping Elon Musk as a Fellow of the Royal Society
Last November, I wrote a blogpost explaining why I had resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In brief, over the summer a group ...
deevybee.blogspot.com
Very good summary of all the insane stuff unfolding in the US- solidarity to all my colleagues over there
Grace Lindsay@neurograce.bsky.social · last yr.good post www.science.org/content/blog...
Worth a read for those outside HE to get a flavour of the mess that ChatGPT etc are causing the whole sector www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
‘I received a first but it felt tainted and undeserved’: inside the university AI cheating crisis
More than half of students are now using generative AI, casting a shadow over campuses as tutors and students turn on each other and hardworking learners are caught in the flak. Will Coldwell reports ...
theguardian.com
Browse a Focus issue from Nature Human Behaviour on menstruation. Authors discuss periods from a multidisciplinary perspective, including addressing menstrual myths, period poverty, and menstrual health management for diverse populations. https://go.nature.com/4iCnUOw 🧪
