Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Call for papers for Evolang 2026 is now posted! evolang2026.org. Workshop proposals due Sept 22nd. Paper submissions October 26th. Evolang is interdisciplinarity at its best. We hope to see you in Plovdiv!!

What the science of baby-speak can tell us about whale songs A new study reveals that whale song and human languages share features that make them easier to learn.

My latest story for National Geographic, about the similarities between whale song and human language, featuring @inbalarnon.bsky.social, @simonkirby.bsky.social, @ellengarland.bsky.social, @masonyoungblood.bsky.social and @rferrericancho.bsky.social!

Organization of Communication System in Tursiops Truncatus Montagu The problem of the degree of complexity and semantic capabilities of the acoustic communicative system in bottlenose dolphins has been under discussion for over a quarter of a century, ever since John...

Congratulations to the authors of the original articles!
Thank you Tim for the piece and the last minute effort in recognizing previous work by McCowan et al on dolphins!
See also Markov & Ostrovskaya (1990) doi.org/10.1007/978-...
Further historical references cqllab.upc.edu/biblio/laws/

A new preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... about one paradox in word order #typology. On the one hand, SOV has longer dependency distances and therefore higher processing costs than SVO (@rferrericancho.bsky.social, H.Liu, Futrell et al...)

The rise and fall of peer review Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing

A healing reading on the reality of the peer-review system
(thank you Carles Sora-Domenjo for sending it to me).
www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-a...

Far-right party influence on polarization dynamics in electoral campaign Political polarization has attracted increasing attention in recent years, driven by the rise of social media and the global emergence of far-right populist movements. This study investigates the dyna...

Not a big surprise, but we confirmed it: far-right parties cause bloc polarization masking other issues in multiparty systems electoral campaign

arxiv.org/abs/2410.23177