The Sovereign Reader Building your "personal culture" in America, one book at a time.

"The truth is the more unique and personalized the books you read, the more original a thinker you will become."

My new piece: The Sovereign Reader

american-innocence.com/p/the-sovere...

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press.

This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website:
tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

Measuring brain sensitivity to semantic distance in spoken narrative comprehension Discourse comprehension requires simultaneous integration of local and global constituents. When hearing a narrative, for example, listeners must link…

Paper alert! (1/2) We examined brain activation for each content word in a podcast relative to incrementally larger ngrams (1-word, 5-words, 10-words) that precede each word with a focus on semantic distance. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A short survey on research practices with eye-tracking data, especially in reading studies, as part of the OpenEye Project
soscisurvey.de/OpenEye/
Deadline for participation: December 20

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

The Bilingual Brain: Translation as Adaptation Bilingual brains reveal something fundamental about human intelligence. It's not about language. It's about domain translation, the cognitive capacity AI cannot replicate.

My new Psychology Today piece, “The Bilingual Brain: Translation as Adaptation,” was selected as an Essential Read.
Grateful for the recognition — and for the chance to keep developing this idea of translation as a core human adaptation. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

Our chapter "Language-Dependent Memory in Bilingualism" is now published in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics! Excited to contribute to such a comprehensive collection of topics.
doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal20345

Full text here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language | Quanta Magazine Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some similarities to LL...

In brain scans of around 1,400 people, the cognitive scientist Ev Fedorenko has identified a sort of digestive system for language. Fedorenko spoke with Quanta about the system’s workings and how they might be compared to an LLM or the digestive system. www.quantamagazine.org/the-polyglot...

New #Eyetracking study:
German morphological case in L1 speakers in Germany vs L1 speakers residing abroad
#realtimeprocessing #L1attrition #multilingualism #bilingualism #langsky
🔗 doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Excited that this paper on biscriptality in L2 reading is out, which leverages ENRO data (meco-read.com/about-enro/). Led by doctoral student Naima Mansuri and co-authored w/ great trainees (@estehr.bsky.social, @antonioiniesta.bsky.social, and others not here).

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New preprint!

"Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction"

(by Li, Hammond, & me)

link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

-- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary

Breaking new ground (and other expressions): Unearthing presuppositional strength of idioms If you like idioms, you’ll be… head over heels… for this research. Allow me to… break the ice… without… beating around the bush. A new study on idioms by Nicholas Griffen and Ira Noveck is… the bee…

Cool idiom study!

#language
#cognition

featuredcontent.psychonomic.org/breaking-new...

I'd love to hear more about this, too! We just started seeing something similar in our data :)

How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia) Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus mus...

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez
doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

Which Kind of Science Reform What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun? A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built — that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made u...

What can children learn about morphology when they read for pleasure? We analysed the words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people to find out! Read the blog post here: www.rastlelab.com/post/what-ca...

Picture of Boston University with text overlay that reads: CALL FOR ABSTRACT & SYMPOSIUM SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN Deadline: June 1, 2025 The 50th Annual BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT (BUCLD) November 6-9, 2025 In-person with Online Participation Options More details at www.bu.edu/bucld

#BUCLD50 Call for submissions is now open. We look forward to receiving your 500-word abstracts for 20-minute talks and posters. We also encourage submissions to the BUCLD 50 Special Symposium. Submission guidelines here: www.bu.edu/bucld/calls/...

* This study emphasizes the importance of testing across the linguistic repertoire, as processing patterns vary by language dominance!

* We found no co-activation during dominant L2 processing, while all languages were activated during weakest HL and medium-dominance L3 processing

* Processing patterns differed between activation conditions when listening to input in the two weaker languages

* This is the first study to test trilingual heritage speakers' on-line lexical processing in all three languages

* We developed a trilingual visual world paradigm with 1-language activation, 2-language activation, and 3-language activation conditions

It's finally out! The last and most ambitious study from my PhD, highlighting trilingual co-activation in heritage speakers using eye-tracking, was published today!

Read it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Last week @onurunki.bsky.social, Kateryna Iefremenko, & I co-organized the workshop "Heritage Speakers Learning Languages: Looking beyond the societal language" in Mainz, Germany. After a last minute schedule change, I had the opportunity to share my latest project! Thank you to everyone who joined!

@clartoshka.bsky.social, Kateryna Iefremenko, and I just wrapped up hosting our workshop at #DGfS2025!
Huge thanks to all participants for making our AG 13 'Heritage speakers learning languages' a success! 😊
And stay tuned—we’re working on a special issue featuring contributions from the workshop!

Presented some recent work on individual differences in L3 processing at #ISCOP this week! A lovely few days in beautiful Akko, with some of the top minds in cognition research 🧠

Simple rules for concise scientific writing Click on the article title to read more.

2020. Simple rules for concise scientific writing aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Chart showing instances of wild animals using a hamster wheel left out in the wild, with visits dominated by wild mice, followed by slugs, rats, shrews and a few frogs and snails.

In 2014 Dutch scientists left a hamster wheel outside, to see if wild animals would use it like their domesticated counterparts.

The answer: hell yes! 734 visits from wild mice - plus rats, shrews, slugs ("running" being subjective here) & even frogs and snails.

The apparent reason: fun. Just fun.

Happy to share that Liz Schotter and I have just published a beginner-level tutorial introduction to eye-tracking-while-reading studies in Behavior Methods:

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

1/ Thrilled to share our new paper, authored by @clartoshka.bsky.social and me! 🎉 We conducted the largest assessment of heritage language (HL) research, analyzing over 1,000 articles & 80 expert surveys. Dive in with us as we explore key shifts in the field. 👇

Taking time: Auditory statistical learning benefits from distributed exposure - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review In an auditory statistical learning paradigm, listeners learn to partition a continuous stream of syllables by discovering the repeating syllable patterns that constitute the speech stream. Here, we a...

💬🙇🏼‍♀️💬🙇🏼‍♀️💬🙇🏼‍♀️
The advantage of spaced studying is well documented for explicit learning, but is there such an advantage for incidental #StatisticalLearning of novel #Language?

Jasper de Waard from @jthee.bsky.social’s lab tested it! Find out what we found here : 🔗 doi.org/10.3758/s134...