Dr Suzy J Styles

Straight to the top of my reading pile: Some of my favourite linguists @superlinguo.bsky.social, Hildebrandt & @suzyjstyles.bsky.social with a new paper on spontaneous multimodal iconicity in earthquake narratives doi.org/10.1080/0726... #iconicity #ideophones

Exam booklet with pencil-drawn cartoon of jolly mermaid. Ver cutes. Other distinguishing marks removed form pic.

Who wouldn’t be delighted to stumble across this while marking

I included a parsing question in my Cognitive exam. The sentences featured pirates and mermaids, and encouraged students to include illustrations to help explain their answer -

More than 50 students included drawings 🥹

"to democratize art is not every person having a cute drawing made in seconds, to democratize art is every person having time and health to learn and make art if they chose to, and mainly to have the means to think and relate introspectively with art."

oh - class activity here in case it’s in interest to anyone :)

osf.io/2cvkg

Jumping straight to prejudice is 🤘

Prof notes: The Four "P"s of Language. A language is a way of communicating meaning through a shared set of symbols and rules. Natural languages are realtime systems of communication (spoken or signed) created by groups of people. Babies learn these systems simply through observing others interact. By contrast, writing is a technology used to capture real-time natural languages (more or less accurately), and convey meaning over space and time. Babies do not learn writing without explicit instruction on how the system works. A communication system does not need writing to be considered a 'language' - there are many unwritten languages in the word today! Languages that have been written for a long time can become very conservative — very change-resistant — because you are able to read usage of long-dead people. Spoken languages change faster. *There's no meaningful distinction between a 'language' and a 'dialect', other than the idea of official status, recognised by a group with authority. This means we should think about POWER when we ask who decides what is a 'language'? * Official languages are usually derived from the spoken variety with the most PRESTIGE. This can mean the variety with the most wealth, the most influence, or the most prestigious history given the current power structure (nation, state etc). *Official status is enacted and maintained through formal education in line with local education policies. These policies are determined by the group in power in a nation state or region, meaning that these decisions are grounded in POLITICS. *Once a particular variety has prestige, many people may believe it is 'better', leading to linguistic PREJUDICE.

In my psycholinguistics Lab class I quickly learned that I have to start with class on what I call the 4 Ps of language:

Power, Prestige, Politics and Prejudice

Otherwise all my students regurgitate the idea that ‘formal language’ is correct and everything else is … not even language 🤷🏻‍♀️

This looks like fire! 🔥

"AI art Ghibli trend" but it's Miyazaki's reaction and actually art

Proud to be a life member of @lingsocam.bsky.social, who has just come out with:"Four Reasons Why English Should Not be the Official Language of the United States: Statement Against White House Executive Order “Designating English as the Official Language of The U.S.”
www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...

I won't highlight them all, but here's an obvious one:

"The literature review is thorough but could be more focused. Some references (e.g., classic Piagetian theories of childhood play) seem tangential to the primary argument and could be condensed"

We simply don't reference these theories.

The Indigenous People of North America have decided to go back to calling the Gulf of Mexico, “Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl”. It is what the Nahuatl People originally called it as it is the domain of the goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, who is assoc w/water bodies, including the Gulf of Mexico.

Applications for SCIENCE IRL grants are due *tomorrow*!!

Send us your swinging-for-the-fences scicomm that
- Reaches science disinterested people
- Does not require your audience to come to you
- Effectively hooks people with science
- Gives people ACTION they can take

Call for submissions: Metascience and AI postdoctoral fellowship | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Our mission is to make the world a better place through the advancement of scientific knowledge.

New postdoc opportunity from Sloan to study how AI impacts scientific research. We have a great community growing around AI/STS at Princeton and I would be very happy to consider supporting applications as a mentor - please email if you are interested! sloan.org/programs/dig...

Screenshots of TANGO-CC trials. In Training 1, an agent looks at a balloon that falls to the ground, and participants have to respond by clicking/touching the balloon. In Training 2, the balloon falls behind the hedge while its flight is still visible. Participants respond by clicking the hedge where they think the balloon is. In test trials, the balloon’s movement and final position are covered by a hedge, and participants respond by clicking the hedge. In the task, all movements are smoothly animated (no still pictures). Yellow frames indicate the time point when participants respond (only illustrative, not shown during the task).

🚨Paper alert 🚨

Need a social cognition task for measuring individual- and community-level variation? We are excited to share the TANGO-CC with you! 👀

Paper: doi.org/10.1177/2515...

w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social @patkanngiesser.bsky.social @kirstensutherland.bsky.social
@elmanubohn.bsky.social...

A solid fave!

yessssssss

I don’t come from a tradition where labs are named for PIs, but I can imagine some… ah… complications coming from mine too!

Instead we are the BLIP Lab (for brain, language and intersensory perception)

The OSF is available for preservation of datasets that need saving.

osf.io

Contact support@osf.io if you need assistance

Hey if anyone is considering backing up any datasets for some reason today, the Open Science Framework has free storage up to 5G/private repository, and up to 50G/public repository.

(The OSF is run by a 501c3 (Center for Open Science), so if you do this you might also consider making a donation.)

YouTube video by suzyjstyles The Carrot Talk: ‘Open Research from Top to Bottom ‘ (Prize Talk)

Do you have a Grey CV yet?

I talked about the idea in this short talk 😃

youtu.be/oEZZa5j8ydc?...

a table covered in paddle-pop sticks. Each has an orange stamp of a monkey and stamped text: “An Ape’s Guide to Human Language”

Here’s an example of ask or answer a question:

Students do a no-stakes quiz. and swap papers a few times.

I have everyone’s name on stick. I draw at random, and students can give the answer on the paper they are holding, their own answer or ask for explanations. (I mark the ‘absent’ sticks)

A digital pinboard showing pictures of body outlines with colourful outlines or coloured in limbs. Each post is named as a playing card, e.g., 6 diamonds. some languages have the hands and feet coloured in, others don’t. Some posts include knees and elbows, others don’t.

Here’s an example of pseudonymous responding.

I asked students to show where ‘arm’ and ‘leg’ stop in languages they speak, as part of a Linguistic Relativity module.

Everyone in the class has a playing card as their identifier (they pick a random card from a deck in day 1, and I know who is who)

different profs have different methods aligned to the way they run their classes -

I usually have one of these activities to mark attendance and stimulate engagement
1. small group discussion with collaborative note taking
2. pseudonymous posts on a shared pinboard
3. answer a Q when called on

Profs can set a ‘participation’ component in assessment when they design courses. Students who don’t participate get lower grades.

It does mean we have to track attendance. Fortunately, medical certs are processed centrally and profs informed of dates, so we don’t get buried under medical details

"A story of stories: a large-scale cross-linguistic study of young children’s narratives"

Very honored to contribute to this large-scale project on the development of narrative skills in mono- and bilinguals.

2000+ narratives, 1000+ children, 30+ languages

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5...

New model shows dogs could have domesticated themselves They may have been drawn to the discarded remains from ancient human meals, and a new model shows tame wolves could have become dogs in as little as 8,000 years.

What made ancient wolves into dogs? For one hypothesis, where wolves tamed themselves through scavenging our trash, one objection was it would take too long.

A new study shows nope, they could do it. Good boy.  www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

NIH Overhead Costs explainer

📣 PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT 🔬

I made this short comic to explain what the #NIH cuts mean in practice because behind the abstract label of #overheadcosts are real people, doing important work!

#AcademicSky #resist #organize #scicomm

Seems like a great time to be reminded of the UNESCO* “does it matter if it’s bullshit” flowchart…

*lightly edited

awful isn’t it! It’s about as bonkers as some of our work, but not quite aligned with what we do.