Karen Emmorey

We now have a Society for the Neurobiology of Language Bluesky account @snlmtg.bsky.social! Follow for updates on the meeting. I'm really excited for our fantastic lineup of speakers!

#SNL2025

Sankey diagram showing analysis steps for fNIRS. Snakes flow from left to right showing different design choices that many teams made during data analysis. Overall it looks like sort of a mess.

38 research teams analyzed the same fNIRS data...Really nice visualization of the variety of processing pipelines people use from Meryem Yücel, Rob Luke, et al.:

"fNIRS reproducibility varies with data quality, analysis pipelines, and researcher experience"

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Farm to faculty: How federal research funding changes lives and boosts Minnesota's economy When I was growing up on a farm near Cambridge, I never met a scientist. I didn’t know what scientific research was or how people became scientists. I graduated from

My contribution to the @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social effort to communicate the value of federal science funding:

www.hometownsource.com/county_news_...

Read all about the neural network for sign language comprehension! New review paper with Brennan Terhune-Cotter! Please email me (or Brennan) for a copy if you can't access the paper compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Yes! Those of us who are not at CogSci want to follow along

Production of real signs but not pseudosigns affected by age of acquisition in American Sign Language - Memory & Cognition Research shows that insufficient language access in early childhood significantly affects language processing. While the majority of this work focuses on syntax, phonology also appears to be affected,...

New paper by Nielson & Mayberry - age of ASL acquisition does not impact lexical decision performance or repetition of pseudosigns, but those with late AoA make more errors repeating real signs (with more movement errors).
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Pleased that my new chapter that will be published in the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics has now been published online: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Large-scale genome-wide analyses of stuttering - Nature Genetics Genome-wide analyses in over one million self-reported cases and controls identify genetic variants associated with stuttering and find genetic correlations with autism, depression and impaired musica...

Exciting paper on genetic influences on speech fluency, out now in @natgenet.nature.com. In a big step forward for the field, genome scans of almost 100,000 people with self-reported stuttering, & 1 million controls, identify 57 associated loci. Great work by @piperbelow.bsky.social & her team.🗣️🧬🧪

I’d love a copy!! kemmorey@sdsu.edu

And you get to live in beautiful San Sebastián/Donastia Spain!

Deadline Aug 31: Postdoc, bilingualism, aging, cog. impairment, w/ @angeladebruin.bsky.social, U. of York, UK jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

Including deaf scientists

#isgs2025 "Recurrent Head Gestures: A Cross-Modal Comparison of Pragmatic Functions in Spoken German and DGS (German Sign Language)" - Bauer & Ladewig

Focus on head nods and shakes as shared semiotic resources. Pragmatic functions:
most commonly discursive (spoken) and interactive (signed)

Sad to be missing #isgs2025 Thanks to @marinanc.bsky.social and others for skeeting so I don’t miss out entirely!

Deaf scientists hit by drastic NIH cuts — the research community must support them Severe blows to the ‘deaf-scientist pipeline’ must not mean abandoning its best practices. Here is how to support current and future students.

Severe blows to the ‘deaf-scientist pipeline’ must not mean abandoning its best practices. Here is how to support current and future students, says Wyatte C. Hall

https://go.nature.com/4eDVjqp

Neural associations between fingerspelling, print, and signs: An ERP priming study with deaf readers Fingerspelling is a leading predictor of reading ability for deaf people who use a signed language, but few neuroimaging studies have examined how it …

New ERP study with Brittany Lee! Fingerspelled word primes elicit early N400 effects for printed word targets, similar to printed primes and unlike ASL sign primes. This results suggest shared orthographic representations for fingerspelling and print. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy to report that the @sparksociety.bsky.social NSF grant has been reinstated!

APHA is gathering grants by TOMORROW NOON for Phase 2 of their lawsuit vs. NIH which regards NIH **applications** that were unfairly pulled from review, mishandled, or delayed from being awarded due to DEI issues.

To add your grant to this lawsuit, become an APHA member & submit this survey:

LSA Presidential Research Forum

Join us as scholars rethink terms like “native speaker” and “bilingual”— and work toward empirically driven, contextually grounded characterizations of language use.

Register to attend - www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

#LSA #Linguistics #Sociolinguistics

Oh to be a young researcher starting out! I would have applied for this post ❤️

Morphological awareness and reading skill for deaf and hearing adults Abstract. Both deaf and hearing readers use morphological awareness skills to decode and comprehend printed English. Deaf readers, for whom phonological aw

Just out! New paper w/ Emily Saunders showing that morphological awareness has a stronger relationship with reading comprehension for deaf than hearing readers, underscoring the potential for morphological instruction to support reading development in deaf students.
academic.oup.com/jdsde/advanc...

I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12

Happy to see our new paper published signing children have an action bias even when expressing where an object is located 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages Communication is harder in larger communities. Past research shows that this leads larger communities to create languages that are easier to learn and use. In particular, previous research suggests t....

New cool paper with cool people! Overall, we found that sign languages with more users avoid signs that are particularly low in iconicity (a result parallel with spoken languages) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is proposing a rule to increase career employee accountability. Agency supervisors report great difficulty removing employees for poor performance or misconduc...

🚨 Action alert: Two days left!!

Help protect NSF/NIH from political interference.

👎 A new rule (Sched. F) would allow for replacing career program officers with political appointees.

➡️ Action: Object here by THIS FRIDAY. Comments can be brief and/or anonymous. Helps future litigation.

If thousands of scientists say that political interference with grants assessment is going to destroy the scientific integrity of federal grants, the agency will have to explain why the rule doesn’t do that (which it can’t because this is precisely why the new regulation is being instituted).

11/n

Deaf skilled readers may monitor for phrase structure but not morphosyntax - new evidence from ERPs. Paper just out! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

I can’t recommend this enough.

UNBREAKING, a new project from @lizneeley.bsky.social & co, documents & explains our many concurrent institutional collapses.

It’s beautifully executed work, full of intellectual & moral clarity. 3 pages are live, more will come. It’s SO GOOD, & I learned so much.

The Signing Mind

Linguists & linguistically minded friends! If you are interested in how signs are organized in the mind, consider joining new seminar series "The Signing Mind" hosted by researchers at @bcbl.bsky.social + IDGS Hamburg University. The first seminar is 5/19 5pm CEST
sites.google.com/view/signing...