Alan Langus

Happy to officially announce that @alanlangus.bsky.social and I were awarded a @volkswagenstiftung.bsky.social Open Up grant to investigate infants’ minds🧠

We were delighted to meet all other grantees in Hannover & we’re looking forward to see you again in two years.
#VolkswagenStiftung #kickoff

Did you ever wonder how on earth it is possible for people in Africa to speak up to 12 languages fluently? Our new study 🎉shows that the seeds of multilingualism in Africa are planted early. Infants 👶growing up in Ghana hear between 2 and 6 languages on a regular/daily basis. 1/3 ☺️

The origin of color categories | PNAS To what extent does concept formation require language? Here, we exploit color to address this question and ask whether macaque monkeys have color ...

It would seem that even the basic color words in humans have no corresponding natural kinds in the visual system.

Check out this incredible video from 1941 that details the physics of visual perception using the mechanics of the eyeball from Karl Kurt Bosse

pennstateoffice365-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/person...

YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder I don't believe the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (The most uplifting video I'll ever make.)

Hands down the best explanation of the concept of entropy and how it relates to "information". youtu.be/89Mq6gmPo0s

Several PhD scholarships are available for joining the IDEALAB, an int. Grad School. Projects are carried out at 2 sites, e.g. Potsdam and Groningen or Sydney. Topics in Psycho- and Neurolinguistics, Phonetics, Language Acquisition and Clinical Linguistics. phd-idealab.com/application/...

Another one bites the dust

Humans use language to express thoughts primarily built around the basic agent-patient causal structure
*who does what to whom*
Is this a structure of language or a structure of thought? Does it exist outside language? A new wave of exciting papers speak to this question. A 🧵👇

Language Cycles

What a fantastic morning! Kaffee, a woolen blanket, and the newest additions to The Language Circle Video Library online. Enjoy your days, fellow scientists: youtube.com/@languagecyc...

Stripes of various colors, corresponding to color words found in BlueSky posts.

See the colors of BlueSky, live!
www.bewitched.com/demo/rainbow...
This little visualization scans incoming posts and draws a stripe every time it finds a color word.

Active Playful Learning

Just attended Kathy Hirsh-Pasek's @kathyhirshpasek.bsky.social PINA colloquium talk about the Active Playful Learning program: activeplayfullearning.com. Tons of evidence on how playful learning fosters the 6 C's: Collaboration, Communication, Content, Critical Thinking, Creativity, and Confidence!

I would like to be added.

Prosody outweighs statistics in 6‐month‐old German‐learning infants' speech segmentation It is well established that infants use various cues to find words within fluent speech from about 7 to 8 months of age. Research suggests that two main mechanisms support infants' speech segmentatio...

Marimon et al. (2024): German-learning infants rely on prosodic cues than transitional probs for speech seg'n by 6mos; infants showed no seg'n when prosodic cues absent, highlighting early imptance of lang-specific prosody > stat'l cues #DevPsySky #PsychSciSky #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

“The Rhythms of Speech and Language” preprint (CUP 2025). Proud to be part of it!

Could you add me too?

Could you add me too?

🙋🏻‍♂️

It was so nice! Thank you!!!

Such a great pleasure to visit one of the most exciting baby labs in the world. Thank you @ljubapi.bsky.social and @jrhochmann.bsky.social for having me.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of #Picasso’s death, Picasso Museum Paris invited #SophieCalle whose work relates to disappearance. A real success! (An with « the color blind » which belongs to Lyon Contemporary Art Museum!

Linguists Hear an Accent Begin Residents of an overwintering station in Antarctica provided linguists with evidence of the first small changes in speech that may signal the development of a new accent.

An new accent is born.

Computer museum at University of Tartu

Robots playing basketball

From prehistoric laptops to robots playing basketball at the Researchers’ Night at Uni Tartu.