Our new paper may be one of coolest studies I've ever done. We show that the structures of visual storytelling in comics aligns with the word order of the languages of the comic authors. Here's what we did... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Syntactic headedness aligns with visual narrative structure

Recent research has highlighted how visual narrative sequences involve similar structures and processing as syntax in language, yet no work has asked …

sciencedirect.com

Do non-human primates have theory of mind? My new paper takes a new computational approach to this classic question. We implemented verbal theories of primates' mental representations as computational models. These models completed classic visual perspective-taking tasks.

⁉️ Why do some interactions make sense only if you know what happened before? Our (Arnulf Deppermann and myself) new ROLSI special issue on interactional histories explores how shared experiences across time shape social action, activity, recipient design, etc.. www.tandfonline.com/toc/hrls20/5...

Research on Language and Social Interaction

Interactional Histories. Volume 59, Issue 3 of Research on Language and Social Interaction

tandfonline.com

How does the architecture of a city shape the way we think, talk, and draw space? And how do spatial conventions travel across cultural generations? New paper in Open Mind, spearheaded by Z Alinam (w J Nölle, C Vesper, K Tylén & me): doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.380 🧵 1/

When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization

Abstract. How do urban environments shape the way people conceptualize and communicate space? Using a cultural transmission experiment in virtual reality, we asked participants to navigate one of two ...

doi.org

any ideas for more similar, recent readings on social media communication, having to do with intercultural communication (broadly understood)? In my intercultural comm class I like to include readings that are about how ppl could have different norms leading to miscommunication CMC/social media

Reviewing some old links before deleting my Twitter account I was reminded of "Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science" (doi.org/10.1080/0898...) which contains a great table on deciding authorship order:

The only taxidermied blue whale in the world, 1865 CE, now housed at the Natural History Museum in Sweden. The public was allowed to enter the whale up until a couple was found having sex inside it. Now the whale’s jaws are opened only for special occasions, such as Swedish election days.

This is the only kind of viewpoint diversity academia needs 👇

Richard de Nooy@richarddenooy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Oxford academic Prof George Garnett counted 93 penises in 2018 – with 88 belonging to horses and another five to men. But Dr Christopher Monk said he had counted one more on another man.” bbc.com/news/article...

Great apes reassure one another to maintain the peace Our new study shows that friendly touch before stressful events, like embracing, patting and even kissing, promotes tolerance and peace in chimpanzees and bonobos. Some BBC coverage 🙂 open-access paper below! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Great Apes kiss and cuddle to keep the peace, says study

Hugging before stressful events may be an ancient way of building trust, say scientists studying apes.

bbc.co.uk

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria

In recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this w...

cell.com

Things That Are Awesome About Poland: Going to the Cinema! - I love Cinema City, tickets are cheap (I paid 23.10 zł - around 5,30€ to see the Odyssee on Kinowa Środa/Cinema Wednesday - And they show lots of movies in the original with Polish subtitles

Don't tell me how to live my life, Duolingo #language #linguistics

When you're taking part in the Complaining Olympics, and suddendly The French roll in

Man in Military Uniform with Many Medals

ALT: Man in Military Uniform with Many Medals

static.klipy.com

Things That Are Awesome About Poland: Fast and Cheap Internet and Mobile Data Fibre is everywhere here and it is cheap. - 83% of Polish households have access to fibre. In Germany it is 48.8%, and only half of those actually use fibre connections. - Screenshot is my WiFi in my flat in Toruń.

Hey #CogSci2026! I'm so honored to be receiving this year's Elman Prize! Please join @m2b2.bsky.social and me Friday 2-3:30pm in Gavea A for two joint talks: "Multilingualism in Cognitive Science" and "Multilingualism for Cognitive Science and Society" 1/4 @cogscisociety.bsky.social

Finally we have made the long-requested episode that you can share with your overly credulous friend who thinks the button dogs on instagram are actually cracking jokes rather than being highly edited (plus lots of whale facts!!)

Lingthusiasm@lingthusiasm.com · 3mo ago

Can we teach dogs to express their needs better by pressing buttons? How about bonobos? What have we learned from the first-ever recording of a sperm whale birth? In this episode we get enthusiastic about how people use technology to enhance our communication with these three animals!

Delighted to learn that our project 'Ecological validity in comparative cognitive science' (co-led by @segundo-ortin.bsky.social and yours truly) has been funded! 👇

Revised! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Things That are Awesome About Poland: Żabka 🐸 . Żabka ("little frog") is a convenience store chain and it is everywhere (There are about 12,500 of them across Poland and they open about five new stores PER DAY).

Bird song has been central to the nature-versus-nurture debate. In my latest piece, I argue that new ideas from developmental science, combined with classic studies on the social shaping of song, point toward a way beyond the innate-versus-learned dichotomy. gregorykohn.substack.com/p/templates-...

Templates in Tension: the dialectic of flexibility and structure in birdsong

Flexibility

gregorykohn.substack.com

Our feature review "The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited" has now been published in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences (@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social)! doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Michael Pleyer@symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social) Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Calling all animal culture enthusiasts! The Association for Study of Animal Behaviour and the Primate Society of Great Britain are holding a joint meeting this December on "Social Learning and Culture" 👇

ASABPSGB2026@asabpsgb2026.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Registration and abstract submission for the joint ASAB-PSGB winter meeting in Edinburgh (December 8th - 10th) will be opening on the 1st of July! The theme is Social Learning and Culture. More details about the meeting and registration at: asabpsgbwinter.github.io//2026/

Out now in #OpenAccess in Journal of #Language Evolution: The career of metaphor in pantomime: a motion-capture study of the conventionalization of metaphor. This is the final publication coming out of my POLONEZ BIS fellowship co-funded by the European Commission & @ncn.gov.pl

It's been a while since my last book review. This one's a little different, in the form of a comic reviewing Speaking in Pictures: A Vision of Language by @neilcohn.bsky.social.

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS

Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

pnas.org

Things that are awesome about Poland: Allegro and Paczkomat parcel lockers everywhere. Allegro is the largest e-commerce online retail platform in Poland (10x bigger than Amazon) and you can basically get everything there and can send it to a Paczkomat of your choice, often with next day delivery.

I did an interview with the NCU Toruń Excellence Initiative Podcast on #language acquisition, language evolution, cognition and all interesting things #linguistics! I had a lot of fun and I only had a few "oh no why did I say that?" Moments listening to it! open.spotify.com/episode/6WoM...

Very cool: Gašper Beguš of Berkeley has used an LLM to build incredibly detailed constructed languages, from phonotactics to morphology to grammar HIs paper: aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon... Some press: spectrum.ieee.org/conlangs-ai-... And some languages! conlangcrafter.github.io

ConlangCrafter: Constructing Languages with a Multi-Hop LLM Pipeline

Morris Alper, Moran Yanuka, Raja Giryes, Gasper Begus. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

aclanthology.org

Lovely bit of Disambiguation here