Michael Pleyer

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

A dynamic network approach to bilingual child data Usage-based approaches to language acquisition emphasize the central role of input–output relationships in the gradual emergence of linguistic knowledge. Recent computational work has provided empiric...

New paper with Antje Quick, Nikolas Koch & Paul Ibbotson: A dynamic network approach to bilingual child data doi.org/10.1515/cog-... - #OpenAcess in Cognitive Linguistics

Graphic announcing an award. On the left, text reads “Congratulations to Damián Blasi, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Study. Winner of the FABBS Early Career Impact Award.” The background is dark teal with light green and white text. On the right, a portrait of Damián Blasi, a man with short dark hair wearing a black polo shirt.

The CogSci Society would like to congratulate the brilliant Dr. Damián Blasi @damianblasi.bsky.social for being awarded the 2026 Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences @fabbs.org 👏👏👏

Learn more at cognitivesciencesociety.org/fabbs-early-...

History of Ideas in the Science of AI

Excited to share that our book "History of Ideas in the Science of AI" (co-authored with Luc Steels and Ann Dooms) is now freely available as #OpenAccess!
#OpenScience, #AIResearch, #HistoryOfAI
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

New on the blog: Requiem for writing town ideophone.org/requiem-for-...

On the co-working space we had for our team in corona times, what we learned about interactional affordances, why surface realism is overrated, and how we created a sense of connectedness (also ft. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social)

Studying the Evolution of Abstract Thought - NCCR Evolving Language In the new ERC-funded project, “Conceptual Diversity and the Evolution of Abstract Thought” (CONCEVO), Mansfield will lead a team of researchers to develop a method for reconstructing the evolution of...

I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply
evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the...

doug_hutchinson on Instagram I was born with a genetic condition such that my body does not produce its own alcohol, so I need to take supplements. Fortunately, they have bars inside most of Iceland's geothermal pools. Here's the touron photo bomb of the non #icelandairwaves portion of my trip. less

And also fun that this follows a template of "a genetic X where my body does not produce...", e.g.

I knew I would spell it wrong accidentally...

This is me and as a linguist I of course have never misspelled the word langauge.

111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!! Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!? In thi

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!?

In our latest episode we get enthusiastic about surprise!

Photograph of Isabelle Stengers and cover of her book, Another Science is Possible: A manifesto for Slow Science

Two recent blogs on The Ideophone, prompted by a fun #ReproducibiliTea session in Cologne:

1. On generative AI and reproducibility ideophone.org/on-generativ...

On why the praxis of slow and reproducible science provides useful lessons for navigating the lures of “AI”

1/n

Evaluating the effects of archaic protein-altering variants in living human adults Promise and pitfalls of using large biobanks to study impacts of archaic protein-coding variants in living humans.

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪
Explainer🧵👇1/n

Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition? | Cadernos de Linguística

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

Sometimes I read a Turkish word while in an English mindset and I'm caught off-guard about the stark contrast in structure and efficiency.

Turkish: işletemediysen
English: if you have not been able to make it work

I miss the agglutinative world of words sometimes.

Approaching lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language Languages exhibit variation, which may reflect ethnic, geographic, social or age- or gender-based differences between language users. Many sign languages are known to exhibit lexical variation, with m...

New paper on lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language with Swedish colleagues.

Using a combo of elicitation (in-person), survey (online) & corpus data, we look at some changes in lexical choices over time & discuss methods for measuring variation of variation
#linguistics

doi.org/10.16995/glo...

Nowe spojrzenie na język Nowe spojrzenie na język

Short post about our TiCS paper "The 'design features' of language revisited" on the news portal of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (in Polish)
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
portal.umk.pl/pl/article/n...

From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution? Abstract. Cumulative cultural evolution, where populations accumulate ever-improving knowledge, technologies and social customs, is arguably a unique featu

New paper out in Phil Trans with Angel Jimenez, Keith Jensen and Lei Chang

From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution?

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Bringing emotional cognition to deep time In a new article, my coauthors and I draw upon cognitive science to draw out archaeological traces of ancient social lives

I'm really pleased that my first coauthored article of 2026 is out. With some amazing folks @marckissel.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social we think through a synthesis of behavioral ecology, emotional cognition, and archaeology.

www.johnhawks.net/p/bringing-e...

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories.

In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

While prediction of unobserved features is a reasonable goal, it is not the only goal that people have when building semantic categories. If we only built and lexicalized categories for prediction, we would make a lot of bad predictions as there are a lot of spurious correlations in the environment that we could pick up on (Murphy and Medin 1985). For example, not all birds can fly or defeat Australia in open war.

Well played, Mollica & @nogazs.bsky.social (2025), well played (made me laugh, which doesn't happen often when reading scientific texts!) #language #linguistics

The ‘design features’ of language revisited Language is often regarded as a defining trait of our species, but what are its core properties? In 1960, Hockett published ‘The origin of speech’ enumerating 13 design features presumed to be common to all languages, and which, taken together, separate language from other communication systems. Here. we review which features still hold true in light of new evidence from cognitive science, linguistics, animal cognition, and anthropology, and demonstrate how a revised understanding of language highlights three core aspects: that language is inherently multimodal and semiotically diverse; that it functions as a tool for semantic, pragmatic, and social inference, as well as facilitating categorization; and that the processes of interaction and transmission give rise to central design features of language.

Online Now: The ‘design features’ of language revisited

...form seems to be unique but similar processes found in other animals (and there is of course debate about how ostensive-inferential communication works in humans and other animals)

The combination is an important part of what makes language language - and likely a number of things like iconicity and social and cultural processes are uniquely developed in humans - but again also lots of evolutionary and species continuity. Ostensive-inferential communication in its human...

No, they are more like areas that spotlight important points of comparison with other animal communication systems. I'd say all of them can potentially be found at least in some form in non human animal communication and cognition. eg lots of animal communication is multimodal.

The ‘design features’ of language revisited. Just published (open access) by Pleyer, Perlman, Lupyan, de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Happy World Linguistics Day from Toruń, Poland!

Happy World #Linguistics Day everyone! If you're interested in #language and its evolution, these two threads are a good place to start!
bsky.app/profile/symb...

The ‘design features’ of language revisited Language is often regarded as a defining trait of our species, but what are its core properties? In 1960, Hockett published ‘The origin of speech’ enumerating 13 design features presumed to be common ...

“Core aspects of language: it is inherently multimodal & semiotically diverse; it functions as a tool for semantic, pragmatic, & social inference; processes of interaction & transmission give rise to its central design features“ @symbolicstorage.bsky.social et al in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social:👇🧪

Super proud of this fabulous team for challenging old comparative frameworks and rethinking what makes language language.
Read more in the thread below 👇 or here 📖😊: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

We hope this paper leads to renewed discussions and can provide a roadmap for future research comparing human language and non-human animal communication and for the study of language evolution.
Full paper here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
Press release: www.mpi.nl/news/65-year...