🚨 Hot off the press! 🚨 Eureka moments feel like ⚡️lightning⚡️— sudden, brilliant, impossible to predict. Gauss thought of them as “divine intervention.” But in our new PNASNews paper, we show that you can actually tell when a breakthrough is coming… 🧵(1/n)

June was marked by two more events: we attended the POBudzamy współpracę! science "speed dating" event in which we could listen about projects and research groups from UMK Torun. We represented Centre of Excellence IMSErt NCU and #CLES 🤝 idub.umk.pl/wiadomosci/?id… ...

Silksong tomorrow

Check out my new blog on Psychology Today. First post on... speech pauses :) Psychology Today psychologytoday.com/us/blog/commun…

Just published: Children are not the main agents of language change 🚩🚩🚩 Despite a long standing belief that acquisition errors by young kids are the source of language change, here we show that this idea is poorly supported by empirical evidence. Read: mpi.nl/publications/i…

Finally out: "The role of play in language structure, acquisition and evolution" compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ln… 👆A great collaboration with Michael Pleyer & Stefan Hartmann 👆A view of the nature and origins of language structure and patterns of use, as a result of our proclivity to play

Our paper is finally out! "Deconstructing notions of morphological ‘complexity’: Lessons from creoles and sign languages" Journal of Linguistics - bit.ly/4pmru2J

A must read paper for all scholars in our field‼️ #Complexity is quite complex, and we should be very aware of the underlying biases and assumptions encompassed in this term (which are often wrong, as this paper shows).

I am live-tooting #protolang9 over on the elephant side.🐘You can follow the exact same hashtag there: fediscience.org/@jn/1152090256… Here's a thread of the pre-conf WS: fediscience.org/@jn/1152080676… #languagevolution #linguistics #biology #neuroscience #AI #philosophy #cogsci

MOSAIC is back! Our first MOSAIC meeting on 'Social Networks in the Age of Humans and AI' will feature Yaomin Jiang & Alice Xia discussing trustworthy AI and social networks shaping gossip. All welcome! Thur, 18 September, 2pm-3.30pm UK time (contact Jonas Nölle @[email protected] for Zoom link)

A news feature in nature reporting on our paper that shows whale vocalizations are analogue to human vowels and diphthongs. The paper accepted for publication as of today!

A short read on our new Database - Apemen Faces Database (#ApeFD)! Juan Olvido Perea García and #Wacewicz #cles Centre of Excellence IMSErt NCU #database #ape🤓 portal.umk.pl/en/article/bet…

Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features. Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ln…

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at USC will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

My attempt to depict the neural architecture of language as motivated in my forthcoming book, Wired for Words. Like colors represent functional connectivity. Main insight: linguistic levels are all organized with a sensorimotor-like architecture, the Linguistic Sensorimotor

Interested in multimodal research? Then join us for this showcase MOSAIC later this month!

Amazing article by Marlen Fröhlich and colleagues

Advice from having served on faculty search committees: ALWAYS list in cover letter faculty at place you are applying to whose research aligns with yours & that you could work with. At the very least it shows you're interested enough to put minimal effort to visit their webpage.

Fellow language-evolutionists (other linguists welcome): What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in the field now? #linguistics #language #LanguageEvolution

“In this brilliant and original book, Levinson turns our understanding of language inside out, showing it’s not the core of being human but a result of our deeper social drive.” The Interaction Engine by Stephen C. Levinson Explore more at 📚 cup.org/4hbH1if