Sign reading “rattlesnake self storage 1 mile”, with a phone number.

In TX, the rattlesnakes store themselves. #syntacticambiguity

I’m so glad!

Clixo Welcome to Clixo! A modern magnetic play experience.

clixo.com
- they seem expensive, but they’re great for extended play and pack up easily for travel.

Two bilingualism textbooks - “Bilingualism matters” and “Mysteries of bilingualism”.

Finalizing the details on an undergraduate-friendly course on bilingualism based on these texts. Let me know if you want a copy of the syllabus!

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

Pages from a mini comic

Pages from a mini comic

Pages from a mini comic

My drawn statement on Ai as standalone from my now finished minicomic as syllabus for new liberal studies class! As promised this is shareable, printable - all from my site, feel free to make use of it, cite me & let me know how it’s received. Share away all here! spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

In my latest (and last!) column for Science’s Expert Voices series, I write about the reasons behind AI chatbots’ “deceptive” behaviors (and why Claude threatened a fictional CEO with blackmail).

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I have a student who’s planning an honors thesis around a very similar question!

Image from academic article (Cromer, 1987) that includes the text. "Serious Hypotheses. None."

Sometimes an author's joy leaps off the page. This is from Cromer (1987) in an addendum, in which he describes trying to demo the effect ("the wolf is easy to bite") for Princess Di, only to have the model participant behave exactly opposite of how Cromer had predicted. "Serious hypotheses. None"

HSP folks - does anyone remember who had the poster with comic book format? - I have a student working on a project looking at syntactic complexity in books a 2nd grader might read, and we wanted to consider this poster format.

Post announcing Power Hour for fundraising from 3p-4p today for the Dyslexia Reading Center, as part of Centre Gives.

I'm on the board of the Dyslexia Reading Center. We fundraise to keep tutoring affordable! (More than half of our operating budget comes from donations. We also provide need-based scholarships.) Currently fundraising as part of a local giving event!

Eyes on Reading: What’s Next in the Science of Reading? with Mark Seidenberg and Maryellen MacDonald YouTube video by Planet Word

Video of a talk Mark Seidenberg & I gave to teachers+ at Planet Word Museum @planetworddc.bsky.social. We urged ⬆️ focus on child learning and sentence comprehension in reading instruction. Questions from teachers at the end are phenomenal! Please forward to educators! www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfeF...

Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

Bucknell University (in PA) is hiring for a 1-year VAP in Behavioral Neuroscience! If you like teaching, have a PhD (or ABD) in psych or neuro, and are looking for something to do next year, please consider us!
bucknell.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

Why Official English is a terrible idea for the United States, from @lingsocam.bsky.social. Like and share! www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...

My 5 yo is fully committed to “No I Amn’t” as a grammatical form. #linguistbabyphotos

Do you read Miss Rumphius?

Screenshot of post on Language Log: Bill Labov December 17, 2024 @ 7:40 pm · Filed by Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman under Obituaries, Sociolinguistics William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side. Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation. For now, a warm memory. One night over dinner Bill said that when he wrote he liked to imagine a scholar in the library, perhaps in some faraway place or distant future, opening one of his books and finding a useful insight, just as he had from scholars before him. We got to see him receive news about such an occurrence one evening at that same table: a guest hand-delivered, from the hills of Sindhi-speaking Pakistan, a sociolinguistic book inscribed with thanks for his insight, inspiration, and example. Here’s a favorite picture of Bill turning to say goodbye one Thanksgiving afternoon. Farewell, dear friend.

Photo from Language Log of William Labov, dressed in sneakers, a blue nylon-and-fleece jacket, and a distinctive fur hat

Sad news from the linguistics community: the great sociolinguist William Labov has died at age 97 languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67399

jobrenn.gitlab.io/syllabi/Syll...

I used to use Kemmerer. Now use Brennan’s book. He has his syllabus posted online, which I adapted.

I loved it and thought it was so helpful. Have you thought of doing a young readers edition?

Update: I showed this to my 4 y.o. as I was prepping a parsing activity for class, and her response was “why would you want to clean flies?”

Counting down the days to #DLDday, the day when we raise awareness of Developmental Language Disorder. Get involved and speak up for DLD!
If you've never heard of it now is the time to find out more! Ask me here or go to radld.org

How I’m preparing for the semester. (Hat-tip to the tea for teaching podcast!)

Articulation and phonemes, my faves!

Our communication organs are marvellous

23 People Who Didn't Realize Their Childhood Habits Were Super Weird Until Wayyyy Later In Life

apple.news/Az48CBmtZRzW...

Buzzfeed just published a great collection of familect examples!

Ann Arbor is bringing great attachment ambiguities! #hsp2024

4 y.o. (C) comes up to me, puts her head on my lap, and says:

"I don't feel like myself."

me: "Really? I ask, "Are you feeling sick"?

C - "No. I feel like Clara".

me: "And how does she feel?"

C - "Happy."

I'm on the board for a dyslexia center in Central PA. In order to keep our tutoring affordable, more than half of our operating funds come from donations. Sharing this for anyone who wants to help support our students!

My new favorite ambiguity

Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people's... Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from serving as a writing aid to informing hiring decisions. Yet these language models are known to perpetuate...

Original paper:

Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people's character, employability, and criminality

Valentin Hofmann, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, Dan Jurafsky, Sharese King

arxiv.org/abs/2403.00742