Today is the only day you can experience Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” on the day it is set. Audio: archive.org/details/brad... PDF: thephilosopher.net/bredberi/wp-...

Let’s study learning trajectories in self-supervised speech models! 🔊 Do they reflect the hierarchical organization of spoken language? We have analyzed a lot of training checkpoints to find out 🌠 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2604.02043 ⬇️

1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.

Our ability to speak involves remarkable feats of motor sequencing that most of us take completely for granted. The new issue of @science.org has a fascinating essay by Sergey Stavisky, covering his team's use of brain-computer interfaces to restore speech for people with neurological injuries. 🧠🗣️🧪👇

Regaining your voice

AI speech neuroprostheses can restore day-to-day communication after neurological injury

science.org

Our paper "Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy" is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... In this paper, we studied whether the brain is well-organized and interpretable, both globally and locally. (See thread below.)

What's more nonsensical: smashing a pumpkin using a number, or growing flowers inside a sneeze? Our paper on graded inconceivability is out now in Cognition! Come for the cognitive science 🧠🔍, stay for the whimsy 🌼🧚! 🔗Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog

Tomer Ullman@tomerullman.bsky.social · last mo.

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

Now out in BBS, as commentary on @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social's "How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models"! Humans learn much of spoken language structure from speech (not text), & we can study models that do the same. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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...

Linguists should learn to love speech-based deep learning models www.cambridge.org/core/journal... "Once the bottleneck of text can be replaced...modelling more human-like linguistic processes..[& handle] the vast majority of local & regional language varieties that are rarely or never written down"

Let’s study learning trajectories in self-supervised speech models! 🔊 Do they reflect the hierarchical organization of spoken language? We have analyzed a lot of training checkpoints to find out 🌠 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2604.02043 ⬇️

www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/...

Opinie | Een wanordelijk gespeld maar helder prachtig paradijs

Gedicht: Op woensdag 3 juni 2026 overleed Lieke Marsman, ze werd 35 jaar. In april publiceerde NRC dit gedicht van Marsman.Dichter Lieke Marsman schreef De dichter en de duivel, dat later dit jaar ver...

nrc.nl

I'm very happy to share this work that came out of my visit to the GLySN lab! Let's use artificial speech systems to learn new things about the human brain 🧠

Laura Gwilliams@lauragwilliams.bsky.social · 3mo ago

check out our latest preprint led by the one and only @mdhk.net !! using intracranial EEG, we find that distinct neural populations within the temporal lobe encode preceding context, and future context, during naturalistic speech comprehension! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

check out our latest preprint led by the one and only @mdhk.net !! using intracranial EEG, we find that distinct neural populations within the temporal lobe encode preceding context, and future context, during naturalistic speech comprehension! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Presenting this at #ICML with @rjantonello.bsky.social and Aditya Vaidya✨ Why do 𝙢𝙞𝙙𝙙𝙡𝙚 layers in LLMs and speech-audio models best predict brain responses to language? We show a peak in the dimensionality of 🤖 activations (left) to track high 🧠 predictivity (right) 🧵(cross-posted from X)

How is uncertainty in LLMs output reflected in internal representations? In our new work (to appear at ICML 2026), we show that the shape of internal token trajectories provides a direct geometric link to behavioral uncertainty (output entropy). 🧵(1/n)

How would you categorise these images? What features would you use? Preprint just went live looking at how we make sense of things we’ve never seen before (i.e., drawings just like these!). If that sounds interesting, read on or check out the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

Richard @futrell.bsky.social and I have posted our response to the commentaries on our BBS target article "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models." The response is: "You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!" arxiv.org/abs/2604.09501

You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!

Norm, the formal theoretical linguist, and Claudette, the computational language scientist, have a lovely time discussing whether modern language models can inform important questions in the language ...

arxiv.org

On May 8, Stichting Open Spraaktechnologie organizes a workshop on evaluation and interpretability of spoken language systems. Featuring @wzuidema.bsky.social, @hmohebbi.bsky.social, @gaofeishen.com, @yuanyuanzhang.bsky.social, @mdhk.net & @cpouw.bsky.social openspraaktechnologie.org/nieuws/works...

Excited to share our new publication, “Measuring Naturalistic Speech Comprehension in Real Time”! ➡️ rdcu.be/fa3hk #psynomBRM w/ @kriesjill.bsky.social, Shiven Gupta, Maria Papworth Burrel, & @lauragwilliams.bsky.social 🧵1/11

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

Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro! www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/

Representation Biases: Variance Is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance

A central approach in neuroscience is to analyze neural representations as a means to understand a system's function, through the use of methods like principal component analysis, regression, and repr...

eneuro.org

Very excited to have @juice500ml.bsky.social present his new work to our (D)NN-speech reading group this Thursday! Contact me or Kwanghee for the zoom link if you'd like to join virtually.

Kwanghee Choi@juice500ml.bsky.social · 5mo ago

𝐒𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐏𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐕𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬! 🗣️ Excited to be giving an invited talk this Thursday (March 19th, 3pm Amsterdam time)! Huge thanks to @mdhk.net at University of Amsterdam for the invite 🙏

New open-access paper out in Cognition with Megha Sundara (UCLA) - "The acquisition of native language phonotactics: Integrating insights from machine learning, and adult and infant experiments" Link to paper: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... 🧵1/4

🧠🧪🧵1/37 Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

thank you @claudia-lopez.bsky.social for this clear and thoughtful coverage in @thetransmitter.bsky.social on some of our recent work on dynamic neural codes in speech processing! 🧠 🌀 ✨ www.thetransmitter.org/language/shi...

Shifting neural code powers speech comprehension

Dynamic coding helps explain how the brain processes multiple features of speech—from the smallest units of sounds to full sentences—simultaneously.

thetransmitter.org

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

Our paper has been accepted to EACL 2026!🎉 We systematically evaluate several vision-language (VLMs) and language-only models, measuring their alignment with brain responses to concept words. Our results show that vision-language models offer a promising tool to model human concept processing

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues! A thread 🧵