Tara McAllister

Thanks to everyone who joined our virtual open house for the PhD program in CSD at NYU! A special thank you to our current doctoral students for hosting an engaging and informative discussion panel. If you couldn't make it, check out the recording here: bit.ly/4gYVIEO Please share!

Reminder - the virtual open house for the PhD program in communicative sciences and disorders at NYU is coming up next Wednesday 10/9. Please share (and refer me your students interested in speech technology or gender-affirming voice training)!

My lab (BITS Lab @ NYU) is looking to admit a new student in the coming cycle. Please share with anyone interested in sensorimotor control of speech in children and adults / technology development for speech applications / biofeedback for speech sound disorders and gender-affirming voice training!

Considering a PhD in communication sciences and disorders? Join me for a virtual info session on our fully funded 5-year program! Learn about our curriculum, hear tips for a successful application, and meet our faculty/students in breakout sessions. steinhardt.nyu.edu/events/commu...

Decorative image with text "BITS Lab," transgender pride flag, and speech bubble characters speaking and listening

BITS lab is seeking NYC-area English-speaking trans women aged 18-65 for a study exploring how computer-based manipulations can affect how gender is perceived in speakers’ voices. Commitment is one in-person 1-hour session, $20/hr. For more info, see
sites.google.com/nyu.edu/spee...

New one on me…Meta’s LLM responds to a post on a parenting Facebook group reporting its own experience as a parent. Then apologizes for being mistaken about whether or not it has children/life experiences!

Privileged Parents Strive to Get Their Kids Into Special Kindergartens. There’s Something Big They’re Missing. As a scientist, I wonder how many people know how contested the evidence is.

Something different! My piece for Slate magazine: When parents make a decision to raise a child bilingual, it should be about expanding opportunities for human connection, not based on claims of “bilingual cognitive advantage." slate.com/human-intere...

Our project “Improving the Accessibility of Transgender Voice Training with Visual Biofeedback" is eligible for an NIH Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health Research-know anyone from an underrepresented background who might be interested? Please share! wp.nyu.edu/byunlab/2024...

Three trophies for the chort!

I would love to hear what parents think about coding for their kids and who is sending their kids to classes/camps/afternoon activities where the kids supposedly learn coding? I'm asking because when my kid was 2 years old, we toured some summer camps where they offered coding to the kid campers. And there are constant posts here about coding as afternoon activities for kids at the pre-K and kindergarten level. Like how many of you parents, with kids taking coding classes or after school activities in coding, actually do write code in real life? (I'm not talking about the fluff languages like Ruby, Python, etc. but real core C++/Java?) Like, do people not understand that it's just a gimmick? It's not like you, the parent, are there watching your child writing a function call, building a hash table, or optimizing an algorithm.

Parents of NYC are WILD.

Still scratching my head over "In ancient Athens, wealthy citizens supported choruses, schools, and temples, on pain of being sentenced to exile or death. From the late Middle Ages, philosophers proposed that, instead of banishing the rich, society should exploit their bounty."

And what would you call that "qui infligerait" construction?

Reading NYC news briefs in French never ceases to amuse me. "Voices have been raised against the celebration of Groundhog Day, which would inflict on said groundhog a treatment unfitting for so timid an animal." (Open to suggestions to improve my translation!)

Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that we don’t have a monopoly on racist morons here in the US.

Eric Zemmour a sauté sur le mot affrication, sans le comprendre Sur X, Eric Zemmour a sauté sur le mot "affrication", "mais bien sûr c'est l'Afrique, la voilà enfin la preuve du grand remplacement !" Ce serait presque drôle s'il était le seul à avoir tweeté son fantasme raciste. Affrication, en fait, de fricare, frotter, frottement, qui se produit au niveau du palais, celui qu'on a tous en haut de la bouche, la bouche, cet organe trou avec une langue dedans, dans lequel les humains articulent les consonnes, voyelles : bref, ici, il s'agit, pour être précise, une palatalisation.

DYING over this news item where a sociolinguist reports on the increasing prevalence of affrication in French and some right-wingers jump on it and go “Affrication? We TOLD you the Africans were ruining our language!” www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

Bilingual 4-year-old's blend of the day: "I'm clinking my eyes!" (French 'cligner' + English 'blink')

You guys are killing me

🤣

A hand of a person in a business suit holding a sack labeled "GOVERNMENT GRANT"

I'm working on a social media post about a grant and I just need the rest of the world to know that this is what Adobe Express suggested as a stock photo. Why did you go into academia? For the SACKS OF CASH.

It wasn’t bad! Georgian orange wine.

Picture of a table at a restaurant with a bottle of wine labeled ‘mtsvane’

When you go to dinner with a bunch of phonologists, clearly you choose the wine with the best consonant cluster… #LSA2024

Am I the only one who gets mad at toy manufacturers for including penguins in their ‘Arctic animals’ sets? Especially for supposedly STEM toys! I get that kids want to play with penguins, but can you at least call it ‘polar animals’ for the pedantic parents out here?

Text reads "Bravo BITS Lab undergrads; Robert W. Young Award for Excellence in Acoustics." Images of Jennifer Yang and Marcela Lara.

Proud mentor alert: In 2 consecutive years, BITS Lab undergrads have received the Acoustical Society of America's highly selective Robert W. Young award for excellence in acoustics. Congrats to 2022 recipient Jennifer Yang (who just successfully completed her thesis) and 2023 recipient Marcela Lara!

I have had an eye on this for a while! ‘May you please modify the record?’ I’ve seen it exclusively in bureaucratic email exchanges and thought it might be some form of admin-speak. The people I’ve heard it from are my age or older.

screenshot of title and authors of paper + map with 18 colorful box callouts showing where datasets came from

GOOD MORNING BLUESKY!
Very excited about this new paper:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300671120

Key Q: what predicts how much young kids (👶)talk?

How much 🗣 kids heard predicted how much 👶talked, but other factors, e.g. mom’s education, didn’t. #PsychSci #DevPsy 🗣💬

INCOMING SUMMARY🧵ALERT 1/14

The 4-year-old was watching a show in French and told me in English, ‘Those are wheel foxes.’ Huh? Finally figured out she had interpreted ‘renard roux’ (= red fox) as ‘renard roue’ (=wheel fox) 🦊🛞

Updating the code supplement for a manuscript R&R and had to sanitize out comments reading "#test of normality for cranky reviewer" added by my very eminent stats colleague 🤣

The letter g makes the /d͡ʒ/ sound when followed by letters e, i, and y as in gym, giraffe, and genre

So long, initial /ʒ/ in English, we hardly knew ye...

Do you work in gender-affirming voice training? As part of a software development project, my team is looking to connect with both SLPs and trans/gender-diverse people to better understand how resonance is targeted in the GAVT context. More info at forms.gle/VbCK3PHovZQs... Please share!

Working on my laptop in the 4-year-old's room and she informed me that the Slack notification sound says "fish tockadock" - now I can't unhear it