Elisabeth Norcliffe

Linguistic Diversification and Rates of Change: Insights From a Diverse Sample of Sociolinguistic Studies Language diversification and change can be studied using phylogenetic modelling of families over thousands of years, or by close observation of changes unfolding over a few decades at the community l....

Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features.
Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Wow! Many congratulations Claudia!!

We wrote a little overview chapter on Evolutionary Linguistics with Jonas Nölle and @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd ed), edited by Nesi&Milin. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps... (with extra references! the handbook had a limit on those)

So excited to see that IASCL now has a group Zotero library of research on language acquisition in under-represented languages. 👏👏. All information here: www.childlanguage.org/underreprese...

Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact Human population contact leads to consistently similar rates of linguistic borrowing, but effects vary across linguistic features.

Great new paper: Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact

#linguistics #language
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia) Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus mus...

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez
doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

📣 New job alert! I'm looking for a 2-year research assistant for a project on word learning from childhood to adulthood. Come and join us in lovely York! Please RT 🙏 @yorkpsychology.bsky.social jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

Linguistic Synesthesia Cambridge Core - Cognition - Linguistic Synesthesia

Super proud of my first Cambridge Elements, joint work with my long-term collaborator Francesca Strik-Lievers: "Linguistic Synesthesia: A Meta-Analysis"

www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/linguistic-synesthesia/C6B019926C53001D1D698CB0C46F80C6/

Quick summary of the take home message in thread ⬇️

#OA textbooks in #Linguistics! These #textbooks are free to download and use in class 🙂
Enjoy, share, and long live #OA!
www.robertadalessandro.it/oa-textbooks

** New resource ** We analysed the characteristics of words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people. Properties of each word (frequencies, etc) are now available in an interactive website.
cyp-lex.rastlelab.com

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

Updated our lab's psycholinguistic database page to include Kathy Rastle et al's new web interface for the Children and Young Peoples Books Lexicon (CYP-LEX). Check it out! Give me a holler if you want us to link to your dataset or know of others I've missed. www.reilly-coglab.com/data

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete.

My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more.

(link 👇)

EvoBib

I just released EvoBib 1.10, my quote and reference collection that offers a bibliography for historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and beyond.

Browse online at: https://evobib.digling.org/

Get data at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15319997

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

New paper:

At a time critical for language reclamation, the Pangloss Collection offers an example of how a digital language repository of endangered & under-described languages can be interactive, allowing end-users to browse, stream, search, & download these materials. muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/artic...

Last two paragraphs of review: "Throughout the history of modern linguistics, there has been a tension between technical precision and the broader dimensions of language research. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in M's words, 'comparative-historical linguistics … became increasingly narrow and technical in scope, concentrating ever more on the minute details of grammatical forms' (14). August Schlegel in 1831 mocked this 'Pedanterei', while others supported 'the scientific study of languages for their own sake' (35). More than a century later, in a 1955 letter to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (a former president of the Linguistic Society of America), his daughter Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that contemporary linguistics seemed 'self-contained' and 'very narrow' (her emphasis); he responded that 'precision has become an obsessive end in itself' for many linguists.4 Plus ça change: the story of linguistics has always included the challenge of finding distinctive, effective analytic tools that will lead to new ideas about a phenomenon, language, that matters to everyone and affects so many aspects of human life. All too often, we are disciplinary gatekeepers while asking outsiders to be interested in our work. I recommend A history of modern linguistics to colleagues and students in linguistics and all allied fields. This book as a whole has a big story to tell, but it will also reward selective reading. Whatever their goals, thoughtful linguists will find questions of interest and echoes of the present day in James McElvenny's lively, stimulating discussion of our past."

My review of James McElvenny's "A history of modern linguistics" (2024) has appeared in Language 101 (2025) 195-199.

doi.org/10.1353/lan....

A bookshelf filled with various books about gesture, with a prominent book in the center titled 'Gesture: A Slim Guide' by Lauren Gawne. The book cover features a black line illustration of a person with abstract representation of eight different hands doing gestures.

It's publication day for Gesture: A Slim Guide

If you have been wanting to think about gesture in your own research, bring it into your teaching or connect with the field of Gesture Studies, this is for you. It's under 50k words and has a nifty glossary too.

An AI generated colorful image, trying to catch the eye of potential PhD students.

Two Fully-Funded PhD positions at Auckland Uni!

Come help us understand the past and future of global cultural and linguistic diversity.

#linguistics #evolution #academia #phd

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Neural correlates of processing case in adults and children Sentence-initial arguments with role-specific case markers (e.g., accusatives) have been reported to be processed slower than arguments with default c…

🆕 📝 𝑵𝒆𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒄𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒂𝒅𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒏

#EEG evidence that development of top-down #language processing skills is ongoing by age 6 b/c #Basque children‘s and adults’ 🧠 signatures of processing case marking differ in the β-band.

OA here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks for alerting me to this! Apparently it's only OA on Project Muse the first year. After that, it can be freely accessed from the LSA Green OA archive: www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...

But we can do something! If you also work on language processing or first language acquisition focussing on cross-linguistic variation, then submit an abstract to *Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2025* #X_PPL2025!

Call for abstracts: easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/X...

A wonderful paper! I assigned it in an intro to Ling course and students loved it

Thanks for this lovely feedback!

University Libraries launches Continua, a new open-access linguistics journal | Penn State University Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing has launched Continua, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal exploring interdisciplinary linguistics research. The journal will focus on research that ...

Attention linguists -- especially those working on 'morphology' and the mental lexicon: @davidnatvig.bsky.social and I have started a new OA journal called Continua! Please keep us in mind as a publication venue! #OALinguistics

www.psu.edu/news/univers...

Wow! "An Agent-First Preference in a Patient-First Language During Sentence Comprehension", in which we report the first-ever language processing #EEG study on an Austronesian language, is among the 10 most-cited articles in Cognitive Science in 2023! 🧵1/

#TopCitedArticle

doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

Why Official English is a terrible idea for the United States, from @lingsocam.bsky.social. Like and share! www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...

Confs: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2025 (Switzerland): Meeting Description:

The Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning Workshop (X-PPL) brings together the growing community of researchers working to expand the diversity of languages in the scope of…

This Friday 4pm is my professorial inaugural "From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong" (w/ BSL interpretation).

There'll be a lot of iconicity in it! If you're interested, you can register for the webinar under this link:

www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edac...

🎉 Exciting news! 🎉
LAGB has officially made the move from X to BlueSky! While we’ll always appreciate more than two thousand followers we had before, we’re delighted to have already connected with 173 amazing linguistics enthusiasts here and look forward to growing this community! 🤩