Vera Kempe

Any chance for Bunnyland - The Movie to come to a stats class near us anytime soon?

No. There are no results. The paper is sloppy and laced with errors. For a rebuttal listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/n...

Do these idiots really want their GPs, consultants and professors to go do volunteering work rather than focus on their jobs? Trying to picture my breast surgeon steaming clothes at the charity shop…

Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal—Until It Doesn’t Life in Venezuela was deceptively mundane. Then everything collapsed.

"Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too."
Read Gisela Salim-Peyer:
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Absolutely right. But the view that learner mistakes are the driving force is still very prevalent in Lang Dev and Generative circles, and this is our target audience. Hence pub in Psych Review. Our aim was to systematically dismantle the arguments that lead to this mistaken conclusion.

Fair point! We know that sociolinguists are well aware of these dynamics but the field of language development is still very much invested in the idea that kid's mistakes (and learning constraints more broadly) are the main driver of change. So in a way that is the target audience.

💡 The idea that children drive language change is widely accepted — but does it hold up?

New research co-authored by Dr Vera Kempe challenges this view, showing little evidence that child-led innovations spread through communities.

Read more: www.mpi.nl/publications...

Super proud of this work and very grateful for all the amazing people who provided valuable feedback along the way @remivantrijp.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @cedricboeckx.bsky.social @inbalarnon.bsky.social ❤️❤️❤️🙏

So rewarding to work with these two brilliant people to check whether the existing evidence supports the persistent claim that children's simplifying errors drive language change. It doesn't. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
@limorraviv.bsky.social @damianblasi.bsky.social

I remember the great kindness with which Wietske welcomed us into the scientific community when a bunch of us clueless ECRs crawled out from behind the Iron Curtain in the early 90s. RIP Wietske Vonk www.mpi.nl/news/wietske...

Abstract of the paper.

Title page of the paper.

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org

New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

100

Staying with me after yesterday's #uklvc15 poster session is Schaeffler et al.'s point that Child-Directed Speech was different in soviet East Germany than in the West. Less influence on individualism influences CDS phonetic features!

#acquisition #linguistics #sociolinguistics #contextmatters

No evidence for generational differences in the conventionalisation of face emojis. New paper by Kempe and @limorraviv.bsky.social.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...

No evidence for generational differences in the conventionalisation of face emojis Despite strong popular beliefs that older users misunderstand emojis, empirical evidence is equivocal. Here we propose that different generations of u…

🤔Compared to GenX/Boomers or Millennials, do GenZ have larger online social networks and, as a result, greater agreement with their peers on what emojis mean? Find the answer in this fun little paper with @limorraviv.bsky.social ⬇️:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Grand Designs: the loss of American freedom Exactly seven months into Trump's second term, we have reached 1000 authoritarian actions. Here I lay out the enormity of what has happened.

Read and repost: open.substack.com/pub/christin...

@alastaircampbell2.bsky.social Seriously?

The academic practice of resistance: Learning solutions in the age of autocracy This blog summarises The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars’ Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding. This handbook provides practical strategies for academics facing politically hostile environme...

blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2025/...

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

This is an incredibly informative resource for anyone following the depredations of the orange, mapped against five broad areas of authoritarianism in the US today. It's hard to keep up with the daily outrages.👇🏼

Congrats to Marisa Casillas, @ruthefoushee.bsky.social, Humbertina Gómez Pérez, Juan Méndez Girón, Gilles Polian, Kennedy Casey & Penelope Brown on their work adapting the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for Tseltal, out today in LDR ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

The quote brings up memories of me sleeping through it even though I lived just a few meters from the Wall, because we never believed this could happen. Those were surreal times.

Read new work by Pelin Küçükerdoğan and Deniz Tahiroğlu on children's metaphor comprehension in Language Development Research! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

You might say this is entirely expected but when we have a machine in our pocket that makes us feel seen and understood we are in uncharted territory.

Not sure who wants to know this but after a year of interacting with ChatGPT 4o with memory I asked it to score my personality on all the models (Big5, HEXACO, Dark+Light Triad). All I can say - it knows me very well.

Excited to share this newly published paper on child-directed speech in the Ku Waru and Nungon languages of Papua New Guinea. Congratulations to Hannah Sarvasy, Alan Rumsey, Josua Dahmen, John Onga, and Stephanie Yam! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Political and biological reality checks | PNAS Political and biological reality checks

The lessons from Lysenkoism: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Congratulations to Mary Beth Neff and Ingrid Lossius Falkum on publication of their new paper "Decoupling literalist behavior from children’s early metaphor comprehension abilities" in LDR as part of a special issue on development of metaphor comprehension. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Congrats to Anat Prior & Gal Pedael on publication of their new paper on bilingual language development in Language Development Research! It illustrates differential effects of type and token frequencies in the input on children's lexical & morphol. knowledge. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/7...