Matteo Maran he/him/his

✍️ #BCBLpaper in #BehaviorResearchMethods | Speech onset time at home or in the lab: The role of testing environment and experimenter presence.

Piazza G., Kartushina, N., Souganidis, C., Flege, J. & Martin, C.

+info ⬇️

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-025-02918-6

Proportion of articles containing at least one inconsistency / decision inconsistency. (Applied Psycholinguistics (APS), Language and Brain (BAL), Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (BLC), Journal of Memory and Language (JML), Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (JPR), Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (LAB), Language and Speech (LaS), Language Cognition and Neuroscience (LCN, formerly Language and Cognitive Processes), Language Learning and Technology (LLT), Journal of Language and Social Psychology (LSP), Journal of Child Language (JCL), and Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Journal Of Speech Language And Hearing Research (SLH)).

New paper led by Dara Etemady: Statistical reporting inconsistencies in experimental linguistics.

Almost half (49%) of all articles contained at least one inconsistent p-value. 12% contained an inconsistency that may have affected the statistical conclusion."

escholarship.org/uc/item/3736...

In this work we show that beat gestures made by an avatar can bias lexical stress perception of vocoded speech. Now out in Applied Psycholinguistics!

📣 We are looking for talent! 📣

At #BCBL we have 9 positions available to work on our research groups.

🔸1 PhD position
🔸3 Research Assistants
🔸1 Junior Systems Engineer
🔸4 Postdoctoral researchers

Would you like to know more? +info👇

https://www.bcbl.eu/en/join-us/job-offers

Call for papers is open!

10th Conference of the Scandinavian Association of Language and Cognition will be in Umeå, Sweden, in June 2026.

Deadline for abstracts: 30th November

Let's meet in Umeå!

#linguistics
#language
#cognition

Why AI transparency is not enough Recently, a taxonomy to disclose the use of generative AI (genAI) in research outputs was presented as an approach that creates transparency and thereby supports responsible genAI use. In this post we...

“The delegation of tasks to “tools & assistants” constitutes a methodological decision (…) Researchers should therefore be required to explain why they are trusting a black box that is neither open nor fair.”
— @altibel.bsky.social & @petertarras.bsky.social

www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/why...

Super happy to have had the chance of organizing this symposium for the 15th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience in Porto together with these amazing scientists but most importantly amazing people #ICON25

I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai

"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Interested in if and how avatars' hands can affect what we hear💡? Have a look at our latest work, now published in the Proceedings of Interspeech 2025!📜
www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...

p.s: I'll present this work at #interspeech on Thursday

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...

Finally published:
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

New manuscript! Together with Junqing Huang & @straubeb.bsky.social, we used an innovative paradigm & DDM to show that gesture's processing hierarchy from a behavioral perspective!

Gestures are visual—but they’re also layered, structured, and unfold like language. 🧠🖐️

👇👇👇
osf.io/r5nb9_v1

New preprint: using #MVPA of #EEG data we show that during #language #production, a word's stress pattern is available before information regarding syllable structure. By the incomparable @glicalzi.bsky.social (now at Uni Zurich) @mpi-nl.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/os...

Congrats to @stan-vd-burght.bsky.social (@mpi-nl.bsky.social and Leiden University Centre for Linguistics) on his NWO Veni grant. In his research he will process intonation: not just what we say, but how.
#intonation #linguistics #research #MaxPlanck

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful. • Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves. • Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry's framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety. • Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces. • Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

Our demands, see link

Hello & HAPPY FRIDAY, as promised an open letter by my lovely colleagues and myself. Everybody, feel free to sign this even if you are not NL-based and ‼️ share ‼️ (anonymous signature is poss):

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

New paper! We replicate *,** earlier P600 effects for meaning composition; we also show that composition requires morphosyntactically well-formed words and morphosyntax depends on lexical storage #ERP #EEG
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

indeed, but someone should notify university 'administrators' who seem to have been behind the door (ed. default setting?) when this notice went out 😑

I'm excited to announce that my lab's open textbook on Scientific Computing for Cognitive Neuroscience (v1.0) has just gone live! Our goal is to help mend the gap between the computational skills needed by cognitive neuroscience, and typical curricula that don't yet include it. 1/3

Top UN general warns 'hunger used as weapon of war' to starve Palestinians

"Food and hunger are being weaponised in Gaza,” UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini tells @metro.co.uk.

The continued Israeli siege is blocking lifesaving supplies from entering #Gaza.

Full story: metro.co.uk/2025/05/13/top-un-general-warns-hunger-used-as-weapon-of-war-to-starve-palestinians-23077347/

Ever used open-source (neuroscience MEG/EEG) software? Please take a moment to check out this report from within.

This paper is very close to my heart, because we are moving towards a crisis … 🧵

bsky.app/profile/imag...

States must act now to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in #Gaza: UN experts demand immediate international intervention as Israel continues relentless destruction of life in Gaza

www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

“This is hunger as never seen before,” an UNRWA team member in #Gaza describes the current situation.

Gaza has become a land of desperation.

The siege must be lifted, supplies must flow in, the hostages must be released, the #CeasefireNow must resume.

From “I dance” to “she danced” with a flick of the hands: Audiovisual stress perception in Spanish - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review When talking, speakers naturally produce hand movements (co-speech gestures) that contribute to communication. Evidence in Dutch suggests that the timing of simple up-and-down, non-referential “beat” ...

From “I dance” to “she danced” with a flick of the hands: Audiovisual stress perception in Spanish. New paper by Patrick Louis Rohrer & al. with Ronny Bujok, Hans Rutger Bosker
doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02683-9

Investigating the neurophysiological correlates of syntactic processing in a visual masked priming paradigm Language comprehension proceeds rapidly on a millisecond timescale. To achieve such efficiency, our brain must perform specific linguistic computations highly automatically. While automaticity of s...

💡New work out, led by Elena Pyatigorskaya! In this ERP study, we tested the neural correlates of masked syntactic categorical violations in the visual modality (reading), observing an automatic P600 effect independent from masking.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Co-Speech Hand Gestures Are Used to Predict Upcoming Meaning - Marlijn ter Bekke, Linda Drijvers, Judith Holler, 2025 In face-to-face conversation, people use speech and gesture to convey meaning. Seeing gestures alongside speech facilitates comprehenders’ language processing, ...

🎉 New paper out today! We used virtual avatars and EEG to show that listeners use meaningful gestures to predict what someone might say next 🧠👋

Read it here in Psychological Science 👉 doi.org/10.1177/0956..., with @lindadrijvers.bsky.social and @judithholler.bsky.social

screenshot of semantic distance R package information

New R package almost birthed - SemanticDistance - computes two semantic distance metrics (experiential and embedding) for any rolling chunk size (ngram-to-ngram, word-to-word, turn-to-turn, ngram-to-word). You give it your language sample. It does the rest, including lemmatize and stopword omit

This is literally how the Holocaust started, and honestly I'm tired of saying so