Vera Kempe
@vkempe.bsky.social
Chair of Psychology of Language Learning at Abertay University. Here for language & politics. IRL also tango.
‘For many British children, school is a place of stress, in which exam results are overbearingly important and there is minimal scope for other forms of self-expression or creative transgression.’ @will-davies.bsky.social on what’s wrong with Britain’s youth: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
William Davies · Young People Are Different: What do Neets need?
It appears that Britain’s Neet problem is just one manifestation of wider epidemiological and psychosocial trends that...
lrb.co.uk
Each Friday night, I write a briefing on what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪 Aug 7 (Year 2, Wk 32) ⛔ Fauci & contempt vote, new NIH grant terminations 👀 Schwartz confirmed as CDC Director ✅ new mRNA vax approved, $20B in climate grants unfrozen & so much more buttondown.com/liminalcreat...
Year 2, Week 32
Aug 1-7, 2026 – Just keep swimming
buttondown.com
When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!
Children as agents of cultural adaptation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49
cambridge.org
New paper by Alvin W. M. Tan, Kirsten Read, Sophia Gamboa, Janet Bang, and @vmarchman.bsky.social showing text in children's books is lexically and grammatically richer than spontaneous child-directed speech. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...
New research by @ashleyrblake.bsky.social, Richenda Wright, Ewa Dabrowska, Nick Riches & Elodie Winckel in LDR, linking individual differences in analogical reasoning with linguistic outcomes of children with DLD and their typically developing peers. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...
Psychology Prof @lewan.uk demonstrates that online rhetoric predicts violent outcomes. youtu.be/xz2zMQLqFOY?...
Prof Stephan Lewandowsky research presentation on how social media rhetoric predicts real violence
YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit
youtu.be
emptywheel@emptywheel.bsky.social · 2w agoMusk has been socializing violence since long before that. Any analysis of Xitter as a tool of violence has to draw the continuity of Jan6 through to today.
—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi
How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....
The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...
science.org
Consider signing!
Gavin Buckingham @drgbuckingham.bsky.social · 3w agoThe Cognition Group in the Psychology dept at Exeter are at risk of redundancy because "basic cognitive psychology research does not align with the current priorities of funding bodies" If you think this is overtly wrong and misguided, please sign this open letter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Congratulations to Katerina Palasis and Mar Cordero Rull on the publication of their new paper on children's acquisition of French linguistic variants! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...
New short piece by me reflecting on science, non-partisanship, and the current political age. christinapagel.substack.com/p/non-partis...
"Non-partisan" does not mean "silent"
Why scientists and scientific institutions need to speak up for science
christinapagel.substack.com
short video on what is going on with birthright citizenship in the US and a couple of other things! youtube.com/shorts/P7BIC...
What's going on with birthright citizenship in the US?
YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel
youtube.com
Timely piece by @chrischirp.bsky.social and colleagues: academic.oup.com/eurpub/artic...
Europe must learn from America’s assault on science
In June 2026, several prominent diabetes researchers, including Steven Kahn, editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, were removed by police from the annual meeti
academic.oup.com
📢NEW RESOURCE: A new web resource and accompanying report to explore the vulnerabilities to political interference of 33 key UK scientific public bodies & 11 scientific advisory committees! unchecked.uk/public_body_... 1/7
I have another entry out in the International Encyclopedia of #Language and #Linguistics that I am super happy about! "Language Evolution and Social Networks" (with @limorraviv.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1016/B978...
Check out a new LDR paper by Adele Wallis, @mwslp.bsky.social, @vanigupta.bsky.social, and Matthew McKenzie, PhD, on narrative development in adolescents! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...
Congratulations to Virginia Dubasik, Sara Kalhori Boroujerdi, and Rebecca Green on their new LDR paper on vocabulary teaching strategies in children's television programs! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/1...
Universities are among the first targets of authoritarianism. Join #DefendResearch on 7/15 for “The Authoritarian Playbook: Risk, Reality, and Opportunities to Resist Democratic Backsliding in #HigherEd” with @lewan.bsky.social Register tinyurl.com/defendresearch-july #censorship #EduSky #SciSky
Detainees at Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail said guards were denying them food and fresh water until they signed documents presented to them in English that they did not understand. TAT: [Nationalism | Weakening civil rights]
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detainees say guards deny them food and clean water until they sign English documents
Detainees say they’re given ‘rotten’ water and denied meals for not signing papers in English that they don’t understand
theguardian.com
📣 Announcing the release of the 🕊️ Annotated Encyclical 🕊️ from the ethics & society folks at @hf.co. Includes citations to relevant academic work. Very much a WIP. Please add work we haven't added yet! huggingface.co/spaces/socie...
The Annotated Encyclical - a Hugging Face Space by society-ethics
Magnifica Humanitas, annotated with AI-ethics research
huggingface.co
Long, profound and devastating read for anybody who (still) cares about Higher Education in the UK.
London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 2mo ago‘The REF has now morphed into a hugely expensive, attention-engrossing status marker. Few things would improve the intellectual culture of universities more quickly than the complete abolition of this flawed and coercive exercise.’ Stefan Collini on universities www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Not sure what to make of Amazon running sponsored ads for … Marx’s Capital🤔
Out now: The full proceedings volume of this year's #Evolang @evolangconf.bsky.social - 575 pages full of interdisciplinary research on the origins and evolution of language! doi.org/10.17617/2.3...
Congratulations to Megan Waller, Dhruv Nambiar, Anthony Tomasic, Madeline Elston, and Erik Thiessen on the publication of their new paper on children's narratives in Language Development Research! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...
Characterizing children’s naturalistic narratives via machine learning
Storytelling is a fundamental human behavior, and narrative skill is predictive of success in many domains, such that the development of narrative skill is an important process in childhood and adoles...
ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu
Congratulations to Caroline Girardi Ferrari & Maity Siqueira on the publication of their new paper on figurative language comprehension in LDR! This is LDR's first publication to feature dual language abstracts (English and Brazilian Portuguese). Enjoy! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/1...
Development of a figurative language comprehension instrument in Brazilian Portuguese: A pilot study with preschoolers
This study pilot-tests a figurative language comprehension instrument in Brazilian Portuguese, evaluating its applicability and sensitivity with preschoolers aged 3 to 6 years. The instrument comprehe...
ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu
Thinking back to my formative years in the GDR/USSR I will explore if we can leverage engagement with civic governance in and out of academia to halt this trend & retain affordances for democratic behaviours for GenAlpha + beyond. @lewan.bsky.social @chrischirp.bsky.social @psychscience.bsky.social
Association for Psychological Science@psychscience.bsky.social · 4mo ago@chrischirp.bsky.social provides an overview of Safeguarding Scholarship in Emerging Autocracies, an Annual Convention workshop with @lewan.bsky.social @vkempe.bsky.social Learn more about this #APS26BCN event happening NEXT month: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
Read Sandel’s book, y’all. It has explained so much to me. The next step is to work out democratic ways to replace the tyranny of merit with a new social contract.
Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 4mo agoAs Michael Sandel explained in The Tyranny of Merit, as the promise of meritocracy reveals its emptiness, those raised in the system who do work hard but fail to advance feel a sense of meritocratic humiliation, fuelling the rise of populists like Farage www.theguardian.com/books/2020/s...
@chrischirp.bsky.social provides an overview of Safeguarding Scholarship in Emerging Autocracies, an Annual Convention workshop with @lewan.bsky.social @vkempe.bsky.social Learn more about this #APS26BCN event happening NEXT month: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
