Sam Passmore

Simulation-based inference with deep learning suggests speed climbers combine innovation and copying to improve performance #ProcB #OpenAccess #Cognition royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

CE paper alert 🚨! Innovation and copying in speed climbers ->

Oops I should have said Innovation was lower in large populations, not faster.

I'm still on holiday, so please excuse my holiday brain!

Also nice to start the year with a fun publication worked on with a smart colleague and friend!

A success for social media induced collaboration after mason and I started the project from a thread.

Most credit goes to Mason for developing and implementing the model!

A 3D image of a speed climbing wall, next to a graph showing the decline in speed climbing times since 2007.

The cultural evolution of Speed Climbing bit.ly/499QjZM

New article w @masonyoungblood.bsky.social

Innovations are more likely to occur in slower athletes & large populations. Simulations suggest innovation is underutilized!

COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World's Music By Patrick E. Savage (to published by Oxford University Press in Feb 2026)

Just submitted corrected proofs for my first book!
Publication (open access) is scheduled for late Feb 2026 (but the preprint is already available if you don't want to wait: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

The despair when your niche interest appears has a brief appearance on social media but you miss it by half a day because of time zones / your own kin-ties get up at 4am so you go to bed early 😅

Please check out kinbank.net for all your kinship terminology variational needs!

Short answer - it's complicated 🤣
Longer answer - the intersection of genealogical, cognitive, linguistic, and cultural variation alongside individual differences in family make-up and personal relationships makes it complicated 🤣🤣

See:
solomons.gov.sb/wp-content/u...

spccfpstore1.blob.core.windows.net/digitallibra...

Solomon Island Pijin has increased its first-language speaker pop. by 8,281.85% since 1976, according the Solomon Island Census. In 1976, 1,212 people listed their first language as SIP, but in 2019, that number had increased to 101,588. An incredible transformation of the linguistic environment.

Lucy sings this to our daughter all the time! Is it online or in person?

Thanks to my co-authors for doing the hard work of collecting, building, and cleaning the corpus. More to come on the corpus as a whole.

Thanks to all the speakers of Bislama and Tok Pisin
who contributed to this corpus, as well as the community members who facilitated its construction.

I will be presenting these results at the 63rd Conference for the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna tomorrow in the 10.30 am - midday slot

Unfortunately for me, it will be a remote presentation, but I am envious of all the attendees! 🇦🇹

English-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two English-based Pacific Creoles Sam Passmore, Lila San Roque, Kirsty Gillespie, Saurabh Nath, Kira Davey, Keira Mullan, Tim Cawley, Jennifer Biggs, Rosey Billington, Bethwyn Evans, Nick Thieberger, Danielle Barth. Proceedings of the...

NEW PAPER: English acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two Pacific Creoles (Tok Pisin 🇵🇬 & Bislama 🇻🇺). We show that applying existing research to low-resource languages can help speed up their study, particularly for English Creoles.

#ACL2025
aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

ACE Outreach Awards CES will give out two awards of up to $2500 each to support activities that translate cultural evolution research for a non-academic audience or for students outside of the field of cultural evolution...

The 2025 Cultural Evolution Society awards are now open for applications!
-Outreach Award (2 awards, up to $2,500 each) forms.gle/Eq6BhtnptQLQ...
-ECR Grant (2 awards, up to $3,000 each) forms.gle/69DpptguwRqN...
-Building Research Capacity Award (1 award, up to $6,000) forms.gle/ZLGEW612GbZ4...

The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment: Highlighting the Role of Language Acquisition Abstract. We live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss. In the midst of this crisis, it is becoming more and more evident that the psychological and cognitive sciences know very l...

Thanks to my co-authors Birgit Hellwig, Rowena Garcia, and Evan Kidd.

Find the paper here: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

And supplementary material here:
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14498105

The scientific loss of languages is overshadowed by the loss of cultural knowledge. Unlike biodiversity, preserving past conditions isn’t viable or desirable. The best way to address this challenge is through coordination between governments, academia, and, most crucially, engaged communities.

Despite growing concern over diversity and more research on child language acquisition, the number of unstudied languages remains steady. Just two new languages are studied each year, while many more stop being passed to children—soon, more will be lost than studied.

Not only are child language studies focused on institutionally similar languages and capture only a narrow range of phonetic and grammatical diversity. About 10% of this diversity can’t be studied in child learners, as those languages are no longer being acquired by children today.

87% of unstudied languages are written, vigorous, or threatened. Children learning these languages experience informal transmission of language. 48% of studied languages are National languages, entrenched throughout the community. Children are unlikely to learn these languages the same way.

NEW PAPER: Linguistics has long debated the scientific cost of narrow sampling, but growing language endangerment makes this debate urgent. We compare studied and unstudied languages in child language acquisition to assess how narrow sampling limits our understanding
doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

Please repost - keen to find someone grear

Meaning and Purpose: Using Phylogenies to Investigate Human History and Cultural Evolution - Biological Theory Phylogenies are increasingly being used to investigate human history, diversification and cultural evolution. While using phylogenies in this way is not new, new modes of analysis are being applied to...

Not exactly what your after but I think this is great discussion of what phylogenies do / don't tell us in CE.

Bromham L (2023) Meaning and purpose: Using phylogenies to investigate human history and cultural evolution. Biological Theory, 18(4), 284-302. doi.org/10.1007/s137...

More great PhD opportunities, this time with @felicitymeakins.bsky.social

study.uq.edu.au/study-option...

If you're looking for a fun PhD project - I don't think you'll find many better than this!

Reminder of this #culturalevolution starter pack

go.bsky.app/6mZJyQq