Elisabeth Norcliffe

Promotional image for Speaking in Pictures by Neil Cohn

Happy Book Day! My graphic novel Speaking in Pictures is finally out in the world! I planned this book for over 20 years and spent 7 years writing and drawing it, so I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much as I did creating it 🥳 www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

Confs: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2026 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 psycholinguistic and neuroscience research. This research is driven by the recognition that structural/typological and socio-cultural diversity provides important and unique opportunities to see language processing and language learning mechanisms at work. The bulk of processing and acquisition research repr

Confs: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2026

The Phonology and Morphology of Australian Languages by Brett J. Baker and Mark Harvey
Distilling decades of fieldwork, this book provides rich data on the sound systems and word structures of Australian Indigenous languages.
📚 https://cup.org/4q0pWLp

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

2026 big update to the psycholinguistic database page! If you know of corpora, lexical databases, or other resources that I've missed, please LMK. Trying to keep this thing relatively current and could use the help www.reilly-coglab.com/data

This is a great paper going deep on the connection between language (and linguistic diversity) and the mind! 👀👂👇🌍 Highly recommended (like every paper from @enorcliffe.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social)!

Thanks Sebastian!

Constructing Meaning from Language: Visual Knowledge in People Born Blind and in Large Language Models A key function of language is to enable concept construction, but empirically disentangling the contribution of language from the contribution of other (e.g., sensory) experiences is challenging. Comp...

Also in the same issue Constructing Meaning from Language: Visual Knowledge in People Born Blind and in Large Language Models from Marina Bedny's lab www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

A new paper with @asifamajid.bsky.social on the Lexical Typology of Sensory Perception 👇

Covers of 20 books published in 2025

New blog post "Achievements 2025" userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-pres...

book cover vol III

book cover vol II

book cover vol I

Just published "Negation in the worlds languages" (3 vols) edited by Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova with Héloïse Calame. #rcg #openaccess langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

Book cover

📣Out today! Volume 2 of LANGUAGE CONTACT: AN INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK, edited by Jeroen Darquennes, @joesalmons.bsky.social and Wim Vandenbussche. 50 chapters covering the linguistic, (inter)individual, and societal dynamics of language contact & multidisciplinary language contact studies.

ANU Press New Release. Cover image of Projecting Voices Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson

This volume provides cutting-edge research on a wide range of questions in linguistics research, centred on Australian Indigenous languages. Written by world-leading experts, the chapters take a fresh look at current questions in each topic, inspired by the work of Australian linguist Jane Simpson.

Postdoc position in Stuttgart, Germany (TV-L 13, 100%) for 18 months, on authority presuppositions in AI systems with Dr. Agnieszka Faleńska and me. For more information and application info, see here: safety.https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/documents/team/falensaa/aphic_postoc.pdf

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....