Catherine Laing

yay!! congratulations!!

It made Pick of the Week as well! A listener said the episode is "a joyful celebration of the sound of words" and my partner's little girl presented it at Show and Tell. Career goals complete ✔️

Our forensic speech scientists Dr James Tompkinson & Lauren Harrington recently provided expert evidence to a House of Lords inquiry on the use of police transcripts in the criminal justice system.

Their research is helping to inform UK policy.

Learn more:
www.york.ac.uk/language-lin...

sounds fun! I am definitely a noob here :)

and thank you! :)

so it does!!

Happening now on Radio 4! 🤓

I've enjoyed the Child Language Symposium at the University of Reading. It was especially fun to present my work on the iconicity advantage for young children learning onomatopoeia as part of our Iconicity Symposium @suzanneaussems.bsky.social @cyberming.bsky.social @cathelaing.bsky.social

a lovely morning with @yorktoolkit.bsky.social - I always love being part of these events and so great to learn how my work is relevant to A level teaching. Thanks so much for having me!

I totally see that perspective, and I do worry you might be right (that it's a way of staying in the game, I mean). Though this tactic, if that's what it is, is good for absolutely no one in the long term.

💯💯💯

And...now you've got me started....I have started to wonder about the relevance/importance of some of the RQs being asked in my field. My cynical view is that sometimes a question is asked because it's quick and easy to answer, not because it's theoretically interesting or important.

Even as someone who counts things, I am totally with you here. Good, interesting, thorough work often takes time, patience, and a human eye/ear/brain (in fact, multiple human eyes/ears/brains!). Fast and easy science does seem to be taking over.

The exact reason I deleted my account yesterday!

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New paper available in Language & Speech 🤓 another look at phonological networks, this time analysing network graphs for a (I think) zoomed-in view of systematicity in early production 🐣

Systematicity Over the Course of Early Development: An Analysis of Phonological Networks doi.org/10.1177/0023...

Awful news. University for public good?

Not that we in the library wish to encourage profanity, but if you want to get rid of these AI-search summaries (which are often absolute nonsense), just swear in your search terms.

It really works.

My commentary says things I've been wanting to say for a while. If we limit early communication to the counting-up of words, we miss a lot of data. Infants use a lot more than "conventional phonology" when learning how to speak, and some of my favourite examples of this are included in this paper 🤓

This is a commentary on an original review paper by @dilaykaradoller.bsky.social, Beyza Sümer &
@asliozyurek.bsky.social who argue for an integrated model of speech, gesture and sign.

My latest article, "Vocal gestures in early multimodal communication: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek", is now available to read in First Language. There is a paywall, but I can share the electronic version with anyone who needs it.

doi.org/10.1177/0142...

👋👋

Open-ended professorial position at University of Sheffield. We are seeking a Head of the School of English (any EGH discipline, including Language & Linguistics). Deadline 23rd Feb.
Details here: jobsite.sheffield.ac.uk/job/Head-of-.... Please share.

This is great, thanks!

I bought my gifts last night! I usually hate buying Christmas presents but here is a way to make it really meaningful 🎄

academics who boast about overworking are being bad role models and should stop overworking and barring that should shut thee fuck up about it in front of students. <-- general complaint not subtweet of anyone in particular, just pissed off about this today and always

tent on a mountaintop with the sun rising on the horizon

I also cycled across Scotland, camped on some mountains, saw a whale, and have very nearly completed the cross-stitch I started in Christmas 2022 😎

My lockdown project on phonological networks in early development finally got published: doi.org/10.1037/xlm0...

The way babies produce words is more systematic than we'd expect from looking only at target forms - not a surprise given what we already knew about production, but fun all the same.

Also still working on iconicity, of course. Here is a recent paper where we looked at size sound symbolism in IDS: doi.org/10.1017/S030... (also our first registered report!). This is an experimental paper but we're now on with a naturalistic follow-up study.

SENFM This is the website for the project "Identifying the role of sensorimotor feedback as a mechanism of language learning in the first three years of life", selected by the European Research Council and ...

Read a little about it here: senfm.york.ac.uk

We got the first pilot recording back today, very exciting!

How lovely to reconnect with colleagues from all over - very much looking forward to hearing what everyone has been up to!

As for me: I'm currently running a project called SENFM, where we use ultrasound to scan babies' tongues, alongside daylong audio recordings taken across the first year.