After years in preprint, our paper is finally out! We introduce LambdaG, a simple new authorship verification method that matches complex neural approaches. This supports the theory of grammar as a behavioural biometric (like a signature or gait). www.nature.com/articles/s41... #nlp #llm #forensic
To paraphrase Thomas Edison (or whoever actually said it) Statistical analysis is 1% Investigation and 99% Preparation. Most mistakes I see (and make!) result from rushing too quickly to model building!
Study participation advert: "What we want: how can Speech & Language Therapy best meet the needs of autistic children? We are looking for autistic children & young people (9 - 17 years 11 months old) to take part in an adapted interview about their priorities and preferences in Speech & Language Therapy. We hope our findings will support the development of services in this area. In the first part of this study, we are looking for children & young people who are verbally-able, so likely in mainstream schools accessing a mainstream curriculum. A formal autism diagnosis is important and should follow national clinical guidance on best practice. Please get in touch to ask about eligibility or find out more: NDSpeech-LanguageTherapy@manchester.ac.uk. Our team includes experienced & DBS checked autistic researchers & Speech & Language Therapists. The interviews will be adapted to meet individual needs. If your child has more significant language support needs, we will be recruiting these children to a related but different study. Please do ask for details.” The study is a collaboration between the University of Manchester, University of Sheffield and the NHS Manchester University foundation trust. The study is funder by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research.
This month’s #ManyLanguagesChallengeOfTheMonth comes from the world of **grammatical acceptability judgments** by the ML2 CLAPS team. @ambridge.bsky.social
Nominative determinism strikes again
2/2 For å lære mer om undersøkelsen, og delta anonymt, vennligst registrert deg via Prolific.com gjennom følgende link:
app.prolific.com/register/par...
Er du interessert i mysteriene bak det norske språket? Forskere ved Universitetet i Manchester gjennomfører en online undersøkelse som involverer å vurdere ord og setninger, med mål om å avdekke noen av disse mysteriene. Du vil motta finansiell kompensasjon for deltagelsen din. 1/2
Another @jstordaily.bsky.social popular-Psychology post lead-authored by one of my Psychology undergrads - here, Maliha Idow daily.jstor.org/face-value-c...
Most years, one or two of the students on my Psychology in the Real World course pitch a popular psychology blog post to @jstordaily.bsky.social - Here's the most recent, by Aabhya Parnami daily.jstor.org/love-is-blin...
The journal "Language Development Research" is now an official journal of the IASCL! LDR's intended audience is all researchers and professionals with an interest in language development and related fields. Read more on our website: www.childlanguage.org/ldr
Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work.
“If you do a power calculation it’s probably going to tell you that - for this between-subjects design- you’re gonna need like a minimum of 150 participants PER GROUP”
The Stories of Your Life: How Storytelling Explains Who We Are. Ben Ambridge
My latest book, about how we interpret real-life events using plots from movies, TV and novels, is now out in paperback: amzn.eu/d/0jiK7RoY. To celebrate, I talked about the book with my favourite writer Joel Golby on his podcast, Joel Golby's Book Club - shows.acast.com/joel-golbys-...
Good of Frontiers to send me a reminder to post my annual plea to my child language colleagues: DON’T SUBMIT TO OR REVIEW FOR FRONTIERS OR MDPI JOURNALS!
ManyLanguages is on two social platforms:
✨ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1107...
✨ Bluesky (this page): bsky.app/profile/many...
Follow us to stay in the loop, join discussions, and help us spread the word about Big Team Science.
‘It is clearer than ever that recent claims [by the Bible Society] of a wide scale Christian revival, whether misinformation or disinformation, need to be retracted... everyone has the obligation to be rigorous in their presentation of data in the public realm and the claims they make for it.’
When setting up @langdevres.bsky.social I wrote into the rules that while special issues are welcome, all papers must be reviewed by a regular Action Editor - some people have been puzzled by that, but this is why it’s vital!
The next one (though it's adults only) is a team-science project with @manylanguagesc.bsky.social looking at passives. We're keen to get as many diverse languages as possible so please get in touch if you'd like to join as a coordinator or a co-investigator for your language bsky.app/profile/many...
Here they are!
Sorry to blow my own trumpet here, but I've just added all 17 of our empirical studies of the acquisition of under-researched languages to the new @iasclchildlang.bsky.social repository. Huge thanks to all the PhDs/Postdocs/RAs/Collaborators who made them all possible! www.zotero.org/groups/60446...
(Sigur Rós and Godspeed You! Black Emperor make an appearance, but Mogwai do not)
BTW Does anyone know a publicly available list of songs with chills ratings? The CHIM dataset linked to in that article (as well as being classical heavy) has only the number of mentions for each (Top is Mozart Requiem in D Minor. Top non-classical seems to be: open.spotify.com/track/01MXkF...
Fascinating stuff, but I wonder if the *intensity* of the emotional experience could be as (or more) important than the diversity. There's a big literature on which songs cause chills (e.g., doi.org/10.1177/2041...) and I feel like some evoke a narrowish set of emotions, just intensely!
This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social.
We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses.
Here are some of the things we learned:
The recently accepted ManyLanguages project CLAPS - A Crosslinguistic Approach to Passive Semantics led by @ambridge.bsky.social is looking to fill four key leadership roles (Analysis Lead, Scaling Coordinator, Translation Coordinator, Ethics Coordinator). ⏰Deadline: 30th Jan.
I was surprised to see this as I’ve had reviewers strongly object when I’ve claimed in papers that LLMs store exemplars. So was I right all along? Or is there a sense in which what they’re doing isn’t quite “storing exemplars” per se? It certainly sounds like it!
It is unclear to me how much traction Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is getting on BlueSky. I am thinking of switching communication about new papers to LinkedIn, which gives better insight into the # of views garnered. Give us a like if you want Glossa to stay on the Blue side of things.
Verily, it’s a total mystery why this might be a more salient issue in the assortative mating process nowadays 🤔🧐🤷♂️
Is one of your goals for 2026 to write more? One question I get all the time is, "How do you make time to write?" So, here is my unsolicited writing advice for the new year:
What can 40 years of song lyrics tell us about society?
I analysed the lyrics of 1,600 pop songs going back to 1985.
Our music appears to be getting gloomier, less future-looking and more self-obsessed
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