Aurélie Pistono

The first publication of the #ERC project ‘LaDy’ is a fact and it’s an important one I think:

We show that word processing and meaning prediction is fundamentally different during social interaction compared to using language individually!
👀 short 🧵/1

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
#OpenAccess

Really happy to see this finally published. Hard work together with colleagues @engra.me and @jolienfrancken.bsky.social
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Let's Chat About Spoken Discourse: A Tutorial to Support Use of Spoken Discourse Analysis When Providing Aphasia Clinical Services Purpose: Spoken discourse is integral to everyday communication; improving discourse outcomes is a primary goal for individuals with aphasia and ...

Researchers aim to provide clinicians with information related to discourse collection methods, outcome measures (including psychometric properties), and key factors to consider when providing aphasia clinical services.

on.asha.org/445TfnB
@mdutta.bsky.social

Icon image of computer screen with text messaging conversation shown

🗣️ New paper alert! Ever wonder how strangers navigate the messy world of casual conversation? We analyzed 200+ video calls to uncover the hidden structure behind "idle talk" – and found it's way more systematic than you'd think!

Thread 👇

Decoding words during sentence production with ECoG reveals syntactic role encoding and structure-dependent temporal dynamics Communications Psychology - Using electrical recordings taken from the surface of the brain, researchers decode what words neurosurgical patients are saying and show that the brain plans words in a...

🧠 Newly out: Paper-with-a-way-too-long-name-for-social-media! How does the brain turn words into sentences? We tracked words in participants' brains while they produced sentences, and found some unexpectedly neat patterns. 🧵1/9
rdcu.be/epA1J in @commspsychol.nature.com

🚨 New WP! 📄 "Publish or Procreate: The Effect of Motherhood on Research Performance" (w/ @valentinatartari.bsky.social
👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 We investigate how parenthood affects scientific productivity and impact — and find that the impact is far from equal for mothers and fathers.

A comparison of different connected-speech tasks for detecting mild cognitive impairment using multivariate pattern analysis It is common for the elderly population to have age-associated cognitive decline and/or develop neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. Several studies have suggested that classification algor...

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PV4EH...

New paper out with former @emcl.bsky.social student Yiting Chen and @apistono.bsky.social

Interested in um disfluencies in speech? Come to Lisbon this September for the 12th Disfluencies in Spontaneous Speech Workshop!

diss2025.inesc-id.pt?p=322

Prague, 23 November 1911 Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie, Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you!? that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin(3) too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom i

einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter:

(1) your haters are trash
(2) you’re a baller, a true queen
(3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️

I wrote a quick tutorial for a student on how to use to R to get Whisper to automatically transcribe your audio. I figured others might find it useful too. #linguistics joeystanley.com/blog/whisper/

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

NEW: The NIH has begun terminating grants for active projects studying gender identity, DEI, environmental justice, climate change, among other topics.

At least 16 termination letters have already been sent — and hundreds more are coming, people inside NIH tell me.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

6/ Yet, they also highlight the importance of viewing communication as a continuum rather than a binary distinction.

5/ Our results align with prior work (Finlayson & Corley, 2012), reinforcing the idea that filled pauses are largely a byproduct of language production difficulties rather than deliberate communicative signals.

4/ We also examined whether autistic traits (AQ score) or stress levels were related to the proportion of filled pauses, but found no significant correlations.

3/ Our results showed that participants produced significantly more words per tangram when speaking to an interlocutor, suggesting they adapted their communication. However, filled pauses were not part of this adjustment.

2/ We compared self-directed and social speech: Participants described tangrams (thinking they were doing a memory test). If filled pauses are used as a communicative signal, we would expect more of them in social speech.

Do filled pauses serve a …um… communicative function? A comparison of self-directed and social speech Some authors argue that filled pauses serve a communicative function in speech. The current study aims to test this function by analyzing the difference in filler-use in a self-directed and social ...

🚨 New paper alert!

Kasper Van Craeyenest, Bram De keersmaecker, @roberthartsuiker.bsky.social, and I empirically tested whether filled pauses like um and uh serve a communicative function. 🧵👇

🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0163...

Involvement of episodic memory in language comprehension: Naturalistic comprehension pushes unrelated words closer in semantic space for at least 12 h Recent experience with a word significantly influences its subsequent interpretation. For instance, encountering bank in a river-related context biase…

Very proud of this latest paper, which shows that reading two unrelated words in a meaningful sentence will push these words closer in semantic space—an effect observed 5min, 20min, and 12 hrs after initial exposure.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

5/ These findings contribute to the development of computational models of disfluency and point to future research using neural networks to refine our understanding of competition and accumulation mechanisms in language production

4/ Key findings:
Disfluent answers had lower drift rates, meaning they reflect competition between response options, not a stalling strategy.
Despite time pressure, we found individual differences in how participants handled semantic interference, suggesting variation in speed–accuracy trade-offs.

3/ The use of a DDM approach allowed to determine the underlying nature of disfluencies: related to lexical-semantic processes (drift rate), postlexical processes (non-decision time) or related to speakers’ adaptation to task demand (decision threshold).

2/ DDM helps break down response processes into key components:
⚡ Drift rate = how fast information accumulates
🎯 Decision threshold = amount of evidence required/strategies of decision making
⏳ Non-decision time = time spent on other processes (e.g., motor prep)

Disfluencies reflect a... uh... competition between response options: Evidence from a drift diffusion analysis - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Disfluency can occur when a speaker faces difficulty in language production, but it is also as a strategy to stall for time and create an illusion of continuity in speech. To better understand the ori...

Where do disfluencies come from? Our new study (with @roberthartsuiker.bsky.social and @cogsenoussi.bsky.social) uses Drift Diffusion Modelling (DDM) to investigate semantic interference and disfluency in a Picture-Word Interference task.👇👇👇

🔗 doi.org/10.3758/s134...

This is figure 1, which shows models of word production.

Word production has typically been studied using two distinct approaches. A Perspective in Nature Reviews Psychology draws from both approaches to discuss how speakers assess whether production is going smoothly, adjust to difficulties and fix errors. https://go.nature.com/40Oc0sS 🔒