Dan Isbell

What is going on at the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research? Last week this blog focussed on problems affecting Scientific Reports , a mega-journal published by Springer Nature. This week I look at a ...

The journal had noticeably slipped in recent years, attracting the attention of folks like @deevybee.bsky.social who wrote a blogpost about the journal was publishing low-quality work potentially connected to paper mills:

deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/10/what...

Editorial Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Journal of Psycholinguistic Research -

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research is doing some major shaping up; Brysbaert and Folk outline new editorial guidelines to promote robust, reproducible quantitative research with strong conceptual foundations:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Students’ engagement with foreign languages beyond the classroom across target language, proficiency, and experience abroad Language students’ use of the target language (TL) of study in English-dominant settings beyond the classroom is both a means and an end for university-based language programmes: TL exposure outsid...

Excited for this paper to finally come out - a descriptive study of tertiary foreign language students' engagement with their target languages outside of the classroom. In some ways the results are intuitive, but a few surprises and now have a baseline for comparisons.

We wrote a guest post on the TOEFL blog highlighting some recent research findings about speaking tasks featured on the revised TOEFL iBT (and TOEFL Essentials). This research was funded by a TOEFL COE Grant and we hope to see the peer-reviewed study out soon(ish).

www.ets.org/toefl/blog/t...

I live in Honolulu. Locally, there's a perception that "newly built luxury condo buildings" are mostly empty, serving as investments for wealth out-of-state/foreign buyers. Every local news/FB comments section has this. This study usefully shows that locals do move in to these new builds!

I use my middle initial when publishing because there's an academic who does music education with the same first/last and I needed bibliometrics to disambiguate properly, but I am now jealous that I don't have a similarly hilarious and entertaining backstory.

Amid Trump crackdown on Chinese students, one US university appears to block them altogether Purdue says no ban on Chinese students exists, but reportedly rescinded dozens of offers after warnings from legislators

Perdue banning all Chinese students just for national origin. No other reason. The Harper's Letter crowd must be crafting a humdinger of a new letter over this one.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

*very* striking to me that trump's two big losses at SCOUTS--first the fed, now tariffs--are both about core macroeconomic institutions, namely free trade and an independent central bank. "go nuts on culture, go nuts on immigration, but DO NOT TOUCH the neoliberal consensus"

And that follows the model of this paper that pits the old TOEFL iBT against the DET (published as an ETS research report but authored by an external researcher):

rr.ets.org/index.php/et...

Very field/industry specific, but it seems like a gentleman's agreement has kind of broken down: Research arms of language testing agencies seem to be more frequently producing or commissioning critiques of competitor's tests.

What could go wrong?

Fantastic project, and very cool to see the @universityofhawaii.bsky.social contribution, including Micah Mizukami's, a PhD student in my department who is also AD of the Center for Oral History.

Meme: Di Caprio spotting something on TV from Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

Me watching that last scene:

screenshot of Triple Frontier showing a street scene with an IELTS test center sign.

A Hollywood nugget for #languagetesting folks: In the last scene of Triple Frontier, Oscar Isaacs' character blends into a crowd, you can see a banner for an #IELTS test center. I think the shot was somewhere in Colombia (see top right in screenshot).

What It Means to Be a White ‘Race Traitor’

MUST READ from @nhannahjones.bsky.social today.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/m...

This strikes me as a boondoggle waiting to happen. Remember the AI textbooks? The simplest fix would be to task academics with language testing and applied linguistics backgrounds with creating the test, rather than the English lit and humanities profs.

More prep materials for the revised TOEFL iBT have been released:

www.ets.org/toefl/teache...

Opinion | If You Hate Bad Bunny, I Have Bad News for You

This is all good news, actually...
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/o...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

YouTube video by Polyvinyl Records American Football - Never Meant [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO]

For reference:

youtu.be/_NfnXdXpjL0?...

YouTube video by ChineseFootball Official Channel Chinese Football － 電動少女 ［Official Music Video］

So I just learned there's a Chinese band doing Midwest emo called..... Chinese Football.

That is such a good name lol

And the music is pretty good too!

youtu.be/X2goYUJpq9k?...

"People are scared...since you've got an accent, or you're Black, they can stop you for no reason" - absolutely gutting and a regression away from values America has long aspired to (though as of yet not achieved).

We compared intelligibility scores from in-person listeners vs. listeners recruited on Prolific. In-person listeners had higher scores. (No surprise.) Screening out listeners with catch trials helped improve reliability. We had to recruit 360 participants to get 300 that met screening criteria.

Vietnam to accept TOPIK scores in college admissions The Test of Proficiency in Korean will be accepted in Vietnam’s college admissions process, South Korea's Ministry of Education said Tuesday. Vietnam’s Ministry

TOPIK scores now being accepted in Vietnamese universities to satisfy foreign language requirements:

www.koreaherald.com/article/1066...

It seems like ESEM for hybrid CFA-EFA situations where you target non-primary variables to have variance constrained to zero in rotation is just... dredging for marginally improved fit indices?

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

2026 big update to the psycholinguistic database page! If you know of corpora, lexical databases, or other resources that I've missed, please LMK. Trying to keep this thing relatively current and could use the help www.reilly-coglab.com/data

This is also like, exactly the same very weird, very dumb, very likely to be projection take that the not-all-there Naomi Wolfe had about liberal women protesting ICE.

Wait is this new or just (another) thing I've overlooked for years that would have saved me many lines of code?

Lukianoff casually crashing the Oscar Meyer weinermobile into the academy...

They just don’t get it - they’re trying to replace the part of our job we like the *most*.

If they could make an AI tool to vibe-complete travel, reimbursement, and annual reporting paperwork they would make a fucking FORTUNE