Michael Pleyer

Call for papers for Evolang 2026 is now out! evolang2026.org. @cogscisociety.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

An E-Mail from "Case Studies" that reads "Dear Researcher, Hope you're surviving another workweek."

me too, predatory journal, me too...

Job Vacancy at the University of Nottingham: Teaching Associate/Teaching Assistant in Applied Linguistics (full-time, FTC) Do you have teaching specialisation in Applied Linguistics?  We are looking to appoint either a Teaching Assistant or Teaching Associate to work in our team in the School of English. You would join us...

Temporary post at Nottingham - Teaching Associate in Applied LInguistics. Come and work with us in @uonenglish.bsky.social! jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

A slide with a picture of a "Spicy Habanero Chicken Burger" and the title: Burgers: Cultural barriers to marital happiness

Probably my favourite slide from this year's #ICLC17. Cultural and linguistic differences in categorization mean for US-Americans this is a Chicken Sandwich, whereas in many other parts of the world (UK, Quebec, Europe) it is a Chicken Burger. Cool talk by Sarah MacDougall! #language #linguistics

A picture of Alice in front of the title slide

Super looking forward to @alice-gaby.bsky.social's plenary at #ICLC17 on biases in language, cognition and linguists

Aerial photograph of Radboud University campus with the Erasmus tower in the foreground: tallest building in Nijmegen & home to the Futures of Language project. Source: RU

We're hiring! Join us to work at the intersection of social interaction and language technology. Postdoc and PhD positions in my Futures of Language research group, based at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL

Read more: markdingemanse.net/futures/news...

#linguistics #interaction #sts #emca #hci

The Promise and Pitfalls of China’s AI Sign Language Interpreters Broadcasters have embraced the tech in the name of boosting accessibility. But few bother to stop and ask what China’s Deaf community thinks about the interpreters.

Really interesting article on problems with the use of "AI Sign #language Interpreters" in China. Not only technological limitations in capturing the aspects important for sign language, but also "absence of Deaf perspectives & blindspots in the developers’ approach"
www.sixthtone.com/news/1017316

Semantic extension in a novel communication system is facilitated by salient shared associations Creative processes of semantic extension play a key role in language change, grammaticalisation, and (by hypothesis) the early origins and evolution o…

Really awesome study by ‪@kennysmithed.bsky.social‬‬, Josephine Bowerman & @andrewdmsmith.bsky.social out now in Cognition: Semantic extension in a novel communication system is facilitated by salient shared associations
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out our just published review on "Language Evolution as an Interdisciplinary Research Field" :)

Check out this great thread on our just-published paper on the cross-cultural interpretation of speech pauses! We found that the cognitive states associated with long vs. short pauses before giving an answer in a conversation are strikingly similar across cultures 🏄 The paper is open access 🔓

Link to the news item (in Polish): www.human.umk.pl/wiadomosci/?...

A news article from the website of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun (translated from Polish). 3 x MNiSW scholarships for outstanding young scientists The Minister of Science and Higher Education awarded scholarships to 228 young researchers from all over Poland. Applications from scientists representing all 53 scientific and artistic disciplines were submitted to the competition. In each of them, no more than five scholarships are awarded, including a maximum of one for a doctoral student.

I am honoured to have been awarded the Scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for Outstanding Young Scientists.
Also congratulations to my colleague Marta Sibierska! Out of the six Scholarships in #Linguistics in all of Poland two went to our lab, which is pretty awesome!

A picture of the award ceremony

A picture of the rector and me after he handed me the prize

I am honoured to have received the 1st Degree Award of the Rector of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń for Individual Scientific Achievements in 2024 in the Field of Humanities.

Our lab also got a 3rd Degree Award for Scientific Team Achievements, go us!

oh and this #linguistics #language paper is #OpenAccess!

This was a really fun study in #language #linguistics with lots more to investigate! What about other cultures? Why is there an effect for willingness but not knowledge & confidece? What other factors influence these ratings? Some ideas in our paper: www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour... 14/

So both Polish and Chinese raters seem to take factors such as processing difficulty into account when judging the willingness of non-native speakers, although there are some differences in how much they do so 13/

The results for Polish and Chinese

The results for knowledge and confidence are very similar. long pause = less, short =pause more, for all speakers. For willingness, the negative effect of long pauses was also less pronounced for non-native speakers. However, the mediating effect was bigger in Polish raters /12

a humurous image of a hedgehog holding a polish flag in front of a door that says "Mandarin"

But is this a culturally universal effect? In this paper, we asked Chinese-speaking raters to judge Chinese native speakers and Polish non-native speakers of Chinese to see if they would make the same judgements. 11/

A figure of the results

But for willingness, nonnatives and natives do seem to be judged differently! If a native speaker makes a longer pause, they are judged to be less willing, but not nonnative speakers! So our idea that people take into account processing difficulties in nonnatives seems right! 10/

Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound les…

And generally, non-native speakers are judged to be less knowledgeable and confident than native speakers, a phenomenon that is well-documented. And natives making long pauses are still judged to be more knowledgeable than nonnatives making short pauses /9 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For knowledge and confidence there doesn't seem to be an effect, if you make shorter pauses before responding you are judged to be more knowledgeable and confident, if you make longer pauses, you are judged to be so less so, for both native and non-native speakers /8

To test this, in Matzinger et al. (2023) we asked Polish raters to judge knowledge, confidence and willingness of Polish native and (Chinese) non-native speakers of Polish who either answer after a short or a long pause. /7
www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/...

We asked ourselves: Does this pattern also hold for non-native speakers? Maybe people are more forgiving and will attribute longer pauses to problems with processing a foreign language, and not knowledge, confidence & willingness /6

The same holds for knowledge questions. If you take too long to answer a question (such as "What is the capital of Austria") I will think you probably don't know the answer and are not very confident in your answer /5

Identifying a temporal threshold of tolerance for silent gaps after requests This study addresses whether there is a threshold, some particular length of silent gap between two speakers' turns, at which negative social attributions emerg

Across different languages, if you take 1200ms to respond to a request (such as "can you get me a cup of coffee?) people will think you don't really want to fulfill the request even if you say yes. 4/
pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/art...
pubs.aip.org

So across all languages, there is something like "taking too long to respond" and how fast you respond to someone else's turn has important pragmatic implications. If you take too long too respond, it seems something is wrong. 3/

Different mean time of turn transitions in different languages

Across languages, most transitions occur within 0-200 miliseconds. Some languages have shorter average response times, others have longer ones, but all seem to be shorter than 500ms and generally fall ≈250ms either side of 208ms. 2/ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A cross-cultural approach to cognitive state attribution based on inter-turn speech pauses Author(s): Theresa Matzinger, Michael Pleyer, Elizabeth Qing Zhang and Przemysław Żywiczyński

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT 🚨
Out now in Interaction Studies (w/ @thematzing.bsky.social, @elizabethqingzhang.bsky.social & Przemek Żywiczyński). We looked at how Polish & Chinese participants evaluate inter-turn pauses made by native & non-native speakers 1/ www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

Pretty big change regarding #OpenAccess by the National Science Centre (NCN), Poland's largest grant-making agency for fundamental research and basic science. NCN no longer requires publications to be #OpenAccess (though still recommends it).

How do we decide whether someone just made a small error or really said a new word we should learn?
@drlearnasaurus.bsky.social and I won a Levelt Innovation Award to study this question and here's the first paper showing our multi-method approach and that it's more than making a single choice