New sanctioned (t)rant about AI just dropped. On the limits of Alphafold and my worries about the disaster its use will cause for the literature and early-stage academic drug discovery. Look, they commissioned it. And by commissioned I don't mean I got paid, just invited. Awesome process btw.

The AI Chemist: To be trustworthy, LLMs need to show their work

Good scientists reveal how they do their experiments and report their results; so should any machine-driven research

cen.acs.org

😂 according to Reddit I could've made a living as a gangsta rapper: old.reddit.com/r/ProlificAc...

I’m joining linguistics at MIT this fall. Sad to leave UMass, but also excited about learning from people at MIT linguistics! 秋学期からマサチューセッツ工科大学の言語学科で働きます。UMassを去るのは寂しいですが、新しい環境が楽しみでもあります。 whamit.mit.edu/2026/05/11/

A new preprint! We argue that English secretly has complementizer agreement that marks the path of filler–gap dependencies, much like in Búlí, Irish, and Wolof. Its distribution resembles FG dependency path-marking in unrel. languages, with Kiitharaka n- as the closest match. tinyurl.com/4x5f54rw

Hiring! Athulya Aravind and I are looking for a full-time Postgraduate Associate at Yale (Linguistics/Psychology). The position is designed as preparation for PhD applications in linguistics, cog sci, or psychology, including structured mentoring and research training. tinyurl.com/mrxjya5t

If you know of a graduating senior who might want to spend a gap year in @jmhenderson.bsky.social's productive, supportive, and fun lab, pass along this ad for a full-time, NIH-funded RA position! recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07601?fbc...

Junior Specialist- Henderson Lab

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ucdavis.edu

My 6 y.o.: Why can’t babies speak? Me: (omg this kid already overcame empiricism)

You can’t do away with abstract (silent) elements in syntax to model production behaviors!

Aniello De Santo@anids.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Saturday! Poster 6 (#198) Relatedly, Shota, Grusha and I extend previous super cool work by Shota, and use a priming experiment to test whether English speakers represent null complementizers in full RCs but not in reduced RCs. Wanna find out? Come see our poster! hsp2026.org/abstracts/su...

Saturday! Poster 6 (#198) Relatedly, Shota, Grusha and I extend previous super cool work by Shota, and use a priming experiment to test whether English speakers represent null complementizers in full RCs but not in reduced RCs. Wanna find out? Come see our poster! hsp2026.org/abstracts/su...

Friday time! Poster 5 (# 365) @grushaprasad.bsky.social , @shotamomma.bsky.social and I leverage an ACT-R based parsing model (from Grusha’s previous work!) to evaluate potential explanations of gradient effects in cross-structural priming. Explicit parsers FTW!!

My 6 y.o: Tendon Switch (referring to Nintendo Switch)

Dear reviewers, please specify what “simpler analysis” is. You can penalize whatever you don’t like if you are allowed to use that unspecified alternative account as a basis for low scores.

New preprint: psyarxiv.com/dwh8v! We know surface/phonological overlap can matter for reading & memory. But does it bleed into dependency resolution? In English, “pseudo-plurals” like /s/ in *cruise* don’t induce agreement errors—but Russian ones (SG.GEN ~ NOM.PL) have been argued to. (1/3)

Review starts 12/1 (rolling basis): Open-rank (tenure-track/tenured) positions, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, Psych. + Brain Sci., Johns Hopkins University pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

Reposting because the link has expired: PDF: drive.google.com/file/d/1t2EF... (if this doesn't work, lmk) Publisher link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Speakers encode silent structures: Evidence from complementizer priming in English

Do speakers encode abstract structural representations devoid of perceptual-motor content, that is, phonology? In six recall-based production experime…

sciencedirect.com

Shota Momma@shotamomma.bsky.social · last yr.

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out (1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object. (2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Look what just arrived early! It’s chunkier than I thought. Open access version on publication day which I think is the 18th on the @mitpress.bsky.social website. I must admit, I’m very fond of the colour!!! 🐦🐦 #syntax #newbook

Why should you study linguistics? My six year old just asked me how “we make voice out of air.”

6 y.o., out of context: Is Santa super rich?

Tamar is a great mentor/scholar and she is one of the major reasons I am still in academia. Great opportunity

Fernanda Ferreira@fernandaedi.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Posting on behalf of Tamar Gollan, who is not on Bluesky: A postdoc position is open and available immediately in Dr. Tamar Gollan’s Laboratory of Aging Bilingualism at the University of California, San Diego, funded by NIH & NSF. See link for details! psychiatry.ucsd.edu/about/LAB_Go...

The relationship between tense and complementizer is really puzzling…

The following article is now in press at Psychological Review. Interested to hear what people think! "The successes and failures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) highlight the importance of innate linguistic priors for human language acquisition". osf.io/preprints/ps... via

✨New preprint out! With Faruk Akkus and @linguistbrian.bsky.social We show robust evidence for the rapid use of hierarchical relations in memory retrieval. 👉3 VW studies on the Turkish reciprocal 👉More looks to c-commanding subjects & indirect objects than to distractors osf.io/preprints/ps...

lol People, get disillusioned by the illusion illusion

Tomer Ullman@tomerullman.bsky.social · 2y ago

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)

5 y.o: What does "memory" mean? me, a cognitive scientist: (excellent question, let me try to come up with a necessary and sufficient condition for 'memory'....... oh no, my kid is about to lose interest...) ... well, it means "記憶" (memory in Japanese). My partner and me: 🤦

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out (1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object. (2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits (1-year extension possible). Research topic open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching until Summer 2027, light teaching after that (English). Official ad soon. Please share 🙏

How do memory retrieval and prediction work together during sentence comprehension? We use computational modelling and visual world eye-tracking to unpack their interaction in German pronouns. New article led by Elise Oltrogge, together by João Veríssimo, and Umesh Patil: doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ucdavis.edu