João Veríssimo

If you use divergence point analysis code from Stone et al. 2020 or 2021, note that we made a code revision recently, detailed in the Analysis folder: osf.io/exbmk/ Shouldn't majorly affect previous analyses, but the revised version should be used going forward.

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

We welcome contributions on all aspects of word processing (submit by 23 Jan 2026)!

Very happy to announce these two fantastic keynotes:
- Davide Crepaldi @davidecrepaldi.bsky.social
- Jana Reifegerste

WoProc 2026 | 13th International Word Processing Conference Join WoProc 2026, the 13th International Word Processing Conference, in Lisbon, Portugal, from 6–8 July 2026.

SAVE THE DATE! Join us in Lisbon next year for the International Word Processing Conference (6–8 July 2026)!

WoProc continues the legacy of MoProc―a conference that, since 1999, has brought together researchers working on morphological processing.
www.woproc2026.com

maybe she's a proponent of the bootstrap-based method... 🤔

Instead, better tone identification was predicted by pitch acuity. This suggests that domain-general auditory processing―not universal phonological principles―is a more important determinant.

L2 difficulties in the perception of Mandarin tones: Phonological universals or domain-general aptitude? | Bilingualism: Language and Cognition | Cambridge Core L2 difficulties in the perception of Mandarin tones: Phonological universals or domain-general aptitude?

New paper with Chao Zhou in BLC: doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925100114
What makes lexical tones challenging for L2 learners? Previous studies suggest that phonological universals are at play... In our perceptual study, we found little evidence for these universals.

How do memory retrieval and prediction work together during sentence comprehension?
We use computational modelling and visual world eye-tracking to unpack their interaction in German pronouns. New article led by Elise Oltrogge, together by João Veríssimo, and Umesh Patil: doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...

🚀Postdoc position @unimarburg.bsky.social in the project:

"Bridging the Gap Between Verbal Psychological Theories & Formal Statistical Modeling with Large Language Models"
(funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de)

📅Start: 01.10.2025 | ⏳4 years
🔗 Apply now: uni-marburg.de/jhbCen
🔄 Thanks for sharing!

A gentle introduction to Bayesian statistics, with applications to bilingualism research Bayesian analyses have been increasingly adopted in psychology and linguistics as an addition (or replacement) to traditional frequentist methods. However, Bayesian methods are not yet widely applied…

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...
(includes some goodies in the supp. materials, such as tips on speeding up model fitting.)

It's an intro to the foundational principles of Bayesian stats AND a practical tutorial on estimation and hypothesis testing using brms. I build up from simple regression to mixed-effects models.

New paper!
"A gentle introduction to bayesian statistics, with applications to bilingualism research", now out in LAB: doi.org/10.1075/lab....

Ok frequentists, let’s call a truce. This has gone too far.

3rd Workshop on Eye Movements & the Assessment of Reading Comprehension 👁️📖

The full program with abstracts is now online!
🔗 tmalsburg.github.io/Comprehensio...

Table 1 Typology of traps, how they can be avoided, and what goes wrong if not avoided. Note that all traps in a sense constitute category errors (Ryle & Tanney, 2009) and the success-to-truth inference (Guest & Martin, 2023) is an important driver in most, if not all, of the traps.

NEW paper! 💭🖥️

“Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?”

— Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Interesting... Tried mgcv::rmvn() and mvnfast::rmvn(). Both seems to produce the same random numbers (with and without the perturbations in the cov matrix).

Four images to illustrate some prominent single-gene myths. Top left shows a photograph of a person deftly rolling their tongue into a U-shape. Top right shows a photograph of a person’s ear, highlighting the shape and features of the earlobe and cartilage. Bottom left shows a close-up photograph of a person’s eye, with a vivid blue colouration. Bottom right shows a photograph of a person poised to write with their left hand on the blank white page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

right! mgcv can fit a binomial AR(1) model, but it's a little particular... you have to use bam() with discrete=T, for example (which, in turn, this precludes using something other than fREML)

package in the works! for now, you can source "OnsetDetection_Functions_0.4.7.R" from here and see the get_onset() examples in the analyses of Studies 1 and 2: osf.io/9ethq/files/... (note that the function still has some limitations, e.g., it only handles 1 random factor)

Interesting! We do fit a logistic GAMM with (temporal) autocorrelation... but we don't address the spatial autocorrelation at all. In any case, I think it's compatible? Our innovation is using posterior simulations to obtain a temporal CI, but there is some freedom in terms of the model building.

cool! we'd be super interested in hearing how well it works webcam VWP!

We provide a user-friendly R function for researchers to implement our method! Get it here: osf.io/9ethq/files

We formally evaluate a popular bootstrap-based method (Stone et al., 2021) and find that it can produce delayed estimates and inflated type I error rates. We propose a novel GAMM-based method that allows more accurate comparison of onsets between experimental conditions and/or speaker groups.

A novel method for detecting the onset of experimental effects in visual world eye-tracking Determining the onset of experimental effects in timeseries data is important in psycholinguistics, because it allows for a more precise evaluation of accounts of the timecourse of different types of…

New preprint! (w/ @sollago.bsky.social )
We tackle a key challenge in the analysis of visual world data: when do experimental effects first emerge?

SIX YEARS after the initial blog post, this paper is finally published.. what a wild ride

- the blog: bit.ly/3GbOqQa
- original tweet thread: x.com/Nate__Haines...
- published (open access) paper: doi.org/10.1037/met0...

Applications for the ninth summer school on statistical methods for linguistics and psychology close on April 1, 2025. Every year people contact me saying they missed the call, so here it is again :)

vasishth.github.io/smlp2025/

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition is looking for a new Co-Editor-in-Chief!
We are looking for someone with expertise in experimental linguistics and psycholinguistics and a focus on the linguistic side of bilingualism research. See
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New paper with @casillas.bsky.social on Generalised Additive Models for bilingualism research: www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...