Elaine Francis

ExLing lab news: Kudos to undergraduate researchers Lucia Lamagna, Sarah Wu, and Shayna Ramirez for winning a “high distinction” award from Purdue’s Undergraduate Research Expo for their poster mentored by Dr. Kyle Swanson and Dr. Vanessa Sheu! www.cla.purdue.edu/news/college...

Learning through prediction: a case of verb bias learning Linguistic prediction, which emerges from experience, is a pervasive process in language comprehension. However, how prediction develops as learning unfolds and how it drives the learning process r...

📣 Check out how verb-specific knowledge updates incrementally as distributional learning takes place: our first paper on prediction and learning (with Amanda Owen Van Horne @telllab.bsky.social and Yi-Lun Weng) is out!

These dogs are having the time of their lives following this week's historic blizzard in the Northeast. Please enjoy. 14/10 for all

Congratulations!! 🍾🎉

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

My mother requested a real ID twice and was denied. The second time I was with her and it was because her birth certificate is from Puerto Rico and included two surnames instead of the one maiden name listed on her marriage certificate. This policy will systematically disenfranchise women.

The Interaction Engine by Stephen C. Levinson: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.e3df24b2

Highly relatable poetry. Good luck!

At no point in this reading this headline would I have correctly guessed what the next word would be.

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇

Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic!

Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

THEY ARE BUYING UP WAREHOUSES TO HOLD HUMAN BEINGS IN DETENTION INDEFINITELY.

I feel crazy at how everyone is acting like this is normal. These are concentration camps being built right before our eyes. These buildings are not meant to house human beings. People will be caged like cattle and die.

What shouldn’t be “radical” — but unfortunately we live in a world where it is — is the idea that *every* child deserves to be able to see their dreams come true. That’s what I saw.

The Trump admin’s whole case regarding Haitians in Ohio is racism, xenophobia, and lies. There’s literally nothing else to it.

Legal status, proper papers. No criminal record. Employers, neighbors, local leaders say they’re a benefit to the community.

It’s showy, bigoted cruelty, nothing more.

Reminder that, as of the latest reports, Liam Ramos is still in prison in Texas - now for 5 days.

His parents are legal asylum seekers with no criminal record.

EPA Union President Condemns Murder of AFGE Member Alex Pretti NATIONWIDE — Following the murder of Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse and AFGE member, by federal agents in Minneapolis, AFGE Council 238 President Justin Chen released the following statement: “AFGE Council 238 condemns the appalling murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents. As a fellow AFGE member who dedicated his life to serving veterans as a VA ICU nurse, the murder of our union brother Alex Pretti is an unconscionable act of violence and a betrayal of the values federal workers are sworn to uphold.

American Federation of Government Employees union president condemns the murder of AFGE Council 238 member Alex Pretti by ICE.

YouTube video by Andrew Perfors Part 1: How do LLMs work?

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊

Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

The newest video shows very clearly that they attacked him for coming to an aid of a woman that the agents pushed, and then executed him while he was immobilized. Everything the government has said, like with Good, has been a complete lie.

What We Know About a Second Fatal Shooting by Federal Agents in Minneapolis

His name was Alex Pretti. He was an ICU nurse. "In total, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within 5 seconds, according to the video. Footage shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him." #AlexPretti #Minneapolis

I have watched the video of today’s murder several times and I am here to assure you that there were several agents restraining the victim when he was shot, and there is no way they were worried he was going to shoot one. Even if he had a gun, and I think that’s not true, he was not free to use it.

The latest on ICE in Minnesota Live updates on ICE enforcement in Minnesota, with the latest developments and links to deeper reporting as events unfold.

Woman tells Minnesota Public Radio that the man killed today was helping vehicle traffic get around the area where ICE agents and observers had started to gather and "next thing I knew, they shot him." www.mprnews.org/live-updates....

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

If you don't mind, if I could leave this here - it's a wonderful resource and the admins just added a page where people can leave a note of encouragement or support after making a donation and reading the testimonials. We need those today. www.standwithminnesota.com

What Dario says! Send in those papers!

Postdoc opportunity with any of my Oxford colleagues funded by the British Academy. Expressions of interest due next week! www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/british-acad...

It’s happening at Purdue too because of the state mandate. Linguistics is getting merged with a few other majors that are unrelated to language studies. No championship football team here either. 🙁

American Dialect Society Selects Slop as 2025 Word of the Year NEW ORLEANS MARRIOTT–JAN. 9—The American Dialect Society, in its 36th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected slop as the Word of the Year for 2025. More than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.The word slop was recognized for its widespread use for low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI. While AI slop was a nominee in the American Dialect Society’s 2024 Word of the Year vote, in 2025 slop could stand on its own, with theAI context often implicitly understood. Slop was also recognized as a productive combining form to describe anything of little value generated in mass quantities. Presiding at the Jan. 9 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.“Slop isn’t a new word. It has moved from the pig sty, to the algorithm, and now forms new compounds such as sloppunk, slopification, and friend slop,” Dr. Wright said. “This productivity has no end in sight.”Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but also phrases, compounds, and affixes. The items do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion.

The American Dialect Society's Word of the Year is SLOP!

“Slop isn’t a new word. It has moved from the pig sty, to the algorithm, and now forms newcompounds such as sloppunk, slopification, and friend slop,” Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright said. “This productivity has no end in sight.” 🧵

I had a great time in New Orleans at #LSA2026. So nice to catch up with old friends and meet new people! Linked here are some updates from the ExLing lab and Purdue Linguistics. cla.purdue.edu/english/fran...

Logos de trois universités canadiennes : McMaster, Université de Moncton, et Université Laurentienne. Logos of McMaster University, Université de Moncton, and Laurentian University, each with their respective emblems and text.

If you are a Canadian francophone, there's a survey on French swearing researchers are running! Si vous êtes un Canadien francophone, des chercheurs mènent un sondage sur les jurons en français! https://run.pavlovia.org/pavlovia/survey-2024.2.0/?surveyId=97fb5ca8-1eee-41f7-9f7f-8eaa87645a49

Hannah Natanson is an exceptional reporter and should never have been subjected to this type of extraordinary intimidation tactic. We have few details now, but it’s hard to interpret this as anything other than an attempt to squash the freedom of the press.

You have and thank you again!

On the relationship between corpus frequency and acceptability Abstract. Chapter 5 starts by observing that linguists from different theoretical traditions tend to express different views on the relative importance of

academic.oup.com/book/38831/c...