I am thrilled to be a co-author on the paper "Kinematics of Negative Headshake in Seven Sign Languages"! 🎉 A big thank you to my colleague Vadim Kimmelman for the fantastic collaboration! 🙌 doi.org/10.1162/OPMI... #SignLanguages #Linguistics #ComputerVision #Negation #Headshake

Kinematics of Negative Headshake in Seven Sign Languages

Abstract. In sign languages, negative sentences are often accompanied by nonmanual markers of negation, including headshake. In some sign languages, nonmanual markers alone can express negation, witho...

doi.org

Here we go! We can finally share what Sharjeel Shaikh @sharjeelshaikh has been leading the work on with us! Consider participating in our detection challenge

@sharjeelshaikh.bsky.social · yesterday

Gesture Challenge 2026 is open. envisionbox.org/gesture_chal... @babajideowoyele.bsky.social @wimpouw.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @esamghaleb.bsky.social @gdemelo.bsky.social

The 17 August deadline for this postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oslo is fast approaching. Looking for someone keen to explore gesture, vocalization and sense-making in song performance. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Postdoctoral research fellowship in gesture-vocalization relations in song performance (301742) | University of Oslo

Job title: Postdoctoral research fellowship in gesture-vocalization relations in song performance (301742), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Monday, August 17, 2026

jobbnorge.no

🔹 Ubiquitous audiency in China (Horlor) how people engage with ambient/recorded music in Chinese public life. doi.org/10.1017/rma....

🔹 Adjusting to the Other (Pearson) Gesture-based audiencing in Karnatak vocal lessons. doi.org/10.1017/rma....

🔹 Performance in the Round (Polak) Djembe & hand-clapping celebrations in rural Mali — audiency embedded in the music-making itself, no separate audience needed. doi.org/10.1017/rma....

🔹Theorizing Audiency (Polak, Pearson & Horlor) Framing piece: 4 theoretical positions on why audiency is embodied, mutually constitutive with performance, performative, & independent of any fixed "audience" group. doi.org/10.1017/rma....

Explaining cultural variation in perception. Perceptual niche construction as an ecocultural view of perceptual plasticity. Happy to see this article published! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Culture in psychology and neuroscience: Concepts, relevance, and empirical evidence in rhythm perception

Perceptual systems adapt through individual experience across the lifespan, an ability referred to as plasticity. To understand perceptual plasticity,…

sciencedirect.com

Rainer Polak@rainerpolak.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited to share our review is now in press at Physics of Life Reviews. Building on the preprint @sylvienozaradan.bsky.social shared months ago — co-written with A Danielsen, N Jacoby, L Pearson, S Horlor, S Aubinet, and J London. doi.org/10.1016/j.pl... #RhythmPerception #CulturalEvolution

#PhiMiSci published a new article: "Icons in action" by Wim Pouw argues that iconicity is neither reducible to objective resemblance nor to a purely subjective impression, but arises from a niche-constructed organism-environment system.

"Icons in action" is now accepted at Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. Its brings together 4E relational approaches to cognition to get us out of a false dichotomy that has been oscillating in the literature: iconicity as property of mind vs a property of the environment. philpapers.org/rec/POUIIA

Wim Pouw, Icons in Action - PhilPapers

Iconicity is a term used in cognitive science and gesture studies to denote an informative relation between the form of an utterance and the meaning of that utterance. With good design, ...

philpapers.org

Why do we move our heads when we interact? 🤔 My new article (together with a great collegue and gesture expert Silva Ladewig) in Open Linguistics explores the functions of head nods and head shakes in spoken German and German Sign Language. www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/...

Recurrent head movements in DGS and spoken German

While recurrent manual gestures have been extensively studied, nonmanual actions such as head movements remain less explored, especially in naturalistic interaction. This study investigates whether he...

degruyterbrill.com

Sharing a bit more about my contribution to *The Documentarist Turn* 📘 In our chapter, we argue for a **multimodal turn in corpus building**—moving beyond speech-centered approaches and toward documenting the full range of communicative resources involved in interaction.

Happy to announce one PhD and one postdoctoral position at the Rhythm & Brains Lab (PI: Pr. Sylvie Nozaradan), Institute of Neuroscience, UCLouvain, Brussels. Belgium. Connected to the ERC Consolidator Grant HUMAN RHYTHM. More info attached. Please share! #hiring #Neuroscience #MusicCognition

🧵 New paper to appear in The Handbook of Linguistics and Multimodality: “Communicating from head to toe”, with @acwiek.bsky.social and @susfuchs.bsky.social 🥰 We review evidence that language is fundamentally physical, shaped by anatomy and biomechanics from your skull to your soles. 🗣️🦵 [1/6]

Toward a Fuller Integration of Respiratory Rhythms Into Research on Infant Vocal and Motor Development From @susfuchs.bsky.social Elina Rubertus, Laura L. Koenig, Aude Noiray nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

NYAS Publications

From birth, respiration constitutes an intrinsic rhythm. We suggest that vocalizations and bodily movements are interactively coordinated with this respiratory rhythm, providing a temporal framework ...

nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Maria Constantin - Check out the Diamond Open Access Expertise Center's guide "How to flip your journal" research-portal.uu.nl/ws/portalfil...

How to think about culture in psychology and neuroscience? What about seeing it as a source and product of perceptual plasticity? Such an inspiring journey to co-write this paper with R Polak, A Danielsen, N Jacoby, L Pearson, S Horlor, S Aubinet, J London. osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback welcome!

Research position suitable for a PhD student (or beyond), keen to work with multimodal vocal performance data in beatboxing: jobportal.uni-koeln.de/ausschreibun... Deadline: 12 January! Apply here: jobportal.uni-koeln.de/bewerben/2429 Feel free to contact me with questions about the position

Job announcement! Research Fellow (65% TV-L 13), to work on co-singing gesture in beatboxing, based at the University of Cologne. Application deadline: 12 January, 2026 Feel free to contact me with any questions about the position. jobportal.uni-koeln.de/ausschreibun...

Postdoctoral research fellowship available, based at the University of Oslo. We’ll be looking at physical interactions between body movement (gesture) and vocalization in song/vocal performance. If you have any questions about the position, please get in touch!

UiO - RITMO@unioslo-ritmo.bsky.social · 10mo ago

📣We have a 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 in the computational analysis of gesture-vocalization interactions. The position is connected to our new project 𝘊𝘰-𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘷𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (𝘚𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘎𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦) led by Research Professor Lara Pearson

Just published, the co-structuring of gesture-vocal dynamics in vocal performance, with @wimpouw.bsky.social and Thomas Nuttall. Which dimensions of hand and head gestures co-structure with which vocal modalities, and how does this differ across individuals? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Co‐Structuring of Gesture‐Vocal Dynamics: An Exploration in Karnatak Music Performance

In music performance contexts, vocalists tend to gesture with hand and upper body movements as they sing. But how does this gesturing relate to the sung phrases, and how do singers’ gesturing styles ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

nature.com

www.envisionbox.org has been shortlisted for the Leo Waaijers Open Science price: ukb.nl/en/news/shor... @babajideowoyele.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @sarkadava.bsky.social @DavideAhmar @acwiek.bsky.social Amazing Markus Küpper made an animated video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HduI...

EnvisionBOX overview2025

YouTube video by Wim Pouw

youtube.com

Counterpoint: what if studies run in the lab just tell you how behaviour unfolds in that context, because context constitutes part of behaviour? And you aren’t just getting a clean look at the contributions of the organism?

Paul Bloom @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social · 2y ago

New post! smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/its-fine-i...

Alright it's here! Where we push back against the exploratory-confirmatory distinction that's become canonized in metascience and talk about what we think exploratory research (including exploratory experimentation and modeling) means and why our view is incompatible with 'unplanned data analyses'.

Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 2y ago

Just a little amuse-bouche for now but @ufeest.bsky.social and I about to finalize revising a paper on exploratory research, and I really love it. I believe we're making a much needed, thoughtful, and clear contribution while challenging some of the science reform notions of exploration.

One thing that has stuck with me from my reading this fall is a point that Jeff Mielke makes in his 2008 book: "linguists often confuse their shared assumptions with linguistic universals." Since I care about features, I thought I should read Jeff's book in more detail. A thread. 1/n #linguistics

Any European PhDs interested in working with me as a post-doc via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme, drop me a line (a.d.wilson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk or on here). Happy to chat topics, with a focus on perceptual learning, affordances, etc (please RT :)

Elon might be bothered by the journalists coming here but the true heads know that a social media ecosystem's health is most clearly signalled by the frequency of arguments about affordances

Andrew D Wilson@adw.bsky.social · 2y ago

The term “affordance” has become so widespread and diluted that it’s become a problem, & I’m not sure what the solution is Are affordances just generally opportunities for action? Are there different kinds of affordances & we need to carve the space up? Are most people wrong when they use the term?

My 3-month sabbatical has ended! Our first gesture-vocal biomechanics paper got a 100 citations. And... I am slowly getting back on the academic job market. For this occasion, I have updated my pub page, eg search bar, embedded abstracts, AND multi-pdf downloads! wimpouw.com/publications...

For all the newcomers, here is a starter pack of people to follow on #musicscience, music cognition and related topics. just comment below if you want to be added! go.bsky.app/4oZbDpj #musicskyence