Jobs! If you are interested in fundamental research at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look at the PhD and postdoc positions we are advertising. We look forward to growing the Futures of Language team.
TL;DR for English readers: Dutch labour unions representing university workers negotiated with UNL, representing universities’ top management levels. The latter…
For Kurzweil, singularity is the point at which machine intelligence would be more powerful than human intelligence. I’m coming to think it may be near just by the sheer amount of mindnumbing bullshit we are forced to contend with, which is making us all more stupid.
Start your blog with an exultant tone, pompous words, and gratuitous alliterations and I know I’m not so much in for an exciting journey to a fascinating world as a rapid descent into the wastelands of utter mediocrity. I recently came across some obvious LLM-generated slop on science blogging aggregator Rogue Scholar. Here I write up why synthetic text has no place in scholarly blogging.
Oxford University Press is going full surveillance capitalist mode. They don’t do author offprints anymore because authors sharing their work equals “piracy”; want nothing more dearly than tracking their users’ every move; and would rather you didn’t even email your work to students and colleagues. God forbid anyone actually read your publicly funded scholarly work.
Van eind 2018 tot halverwege 2024 had ik het voorrecht om onderzoeksleider te zijn van het Vidi-project “Elementaire deeltjes van de taal” met een Vidi-talentbeurs van NWO, de Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. Dit zijn enkele notities uit de eindrapportage.
New paper! McLean & Dingemanse 2025, A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones. In which we review a diversity of methods and analytical approaches to the documentation of ideophones.
GPT based text generators like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have rapidly become a “cultural sensation”. Here I provide scientific background and guidance on how to think critically and mindfully about these tools in academic writing and research.
I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and could not ignore it so I’m doing a drive-by peer-review. It claims that English-based AI-generated norms are “of particular value for under-resourced languages”. Is that pesky linguistic diversity bothering you? Here, try on these rosy English-tinted glasses and everything will look all prim and proper, promise. Warning: snark detected.
It takes two to tell a story: narrator and audience. Response tokens or continuers like ‘mhmm’ play a key role in making stories work. Two new papers extend the study of continuers across languages and modalities. Work by Lutzenberger et al. reveals the importance of minimal tokens that don’t occupy the main articulators in British Sign Language and Spoken British English. And a study by Börstell showcases a neat methodological replication and extension of the sequential search method, applied to Swedish Sign Language corpus data, with promises of broader applicability.
Academics often feature a few selected papers on their home page. Typically these represent big projects or work published in prominent venues. What I’d like to see more of is “niche papers”: work to be proud of even if it has managed to remain a bit obscure. What are your niche papers?
For years now, I have responded to review requests from Elsevier journals with a friendly explanation of why I cannot in good conscience devote my free labour to their for-profit venture. I always include an out: make some work in the same journal available in open access. Somehow they always find this isn’t possible.
Lab rotations are a regular feature of work in my research groups. Students join the lab and figure out a…
You hear a word like tugɯn-dugɯn and two possible meanings ‘heartbeat’ or ‘gentle movement’. Which one do you pick? People have intuitions about the fit between forms and meanings, even for words they have never encountered. But can we explain those intuitions? And can we use that explanation to predict what people do in experimental tasks? That is the question we seek to answer in The Anatomy of Iconicity.
Knots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. Here I discuss a paper about knots and intuitive reasoning in Open Mind. The paper ties itself into knots about intuitive physics, but pulling at some of the threads, it turns out it’s actually more like a Trojan horse for 4E cognition.
Remarkable promises “integration” with popular cloud storage services but offers only the most clunky implementation possible, where you need to copy files manually one by one. This is not integration, it is the mud run approach to user interface design. A surprising miss given the company’s stated mission to use a human-centric approach to technology.
Reading Latour can feel like sorting through ideas the way you deal with laundry fresh out of the tumble dryer, sorting things out, reuniting pairs of socks, finding the inevitable singletons, creating some semblance of order and accepting loose ends. It all comes out in the wash.
Writing is thinking. The writing process is the most neglected part of our job. We spend millions on fancy equipment and uncountable hours on training for using this or that toolkit. Yet we assume the BA-level academic writing course we once followed is sufficient; the rest we’ll just learn on the job and hopefully soon we’ll automate away with LLMs. It is all formulaic anyway. To think this way is to hollow out the very foundations of scholarly work. Can’t think original thoughts if you don’t find your own voice.
Following on from my post about setting up a Raspberry Pi 400 as my kids’ first personal computer, here I share how I’ve made the system easy to manage remotely and imposed some light parental controls, all while keeping the system open to tinkering. It will be a matter of time until they discover how to break out of it — indeed that is pretty much part of the journey of discovery that I hope they’ll take on.
Our kids (6 and 9) wanted to learn to type, and I think it’s useful for them to become computer literate sooner rather than later, so I spent some time figuring out options. I settled for a Raspberry Pi 400 and they love it.