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Maryellen MacDonald

@maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social

600 followers 340 following 78 posts

Psycholinguist, author of MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/PenguinRH). https://www.maryellenmacdonald.com/

www.maryellenmacdonald.com

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Jun 3

Thrilled to announce that my book MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/Penguin Random House) is out! It explains why language production has huge positive effects on talkers: attention, emotion regulation, exec function & more. Accessible science for general audiences! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046...

More Than Words by Maryellen MacDonald, PhD: 9780593545270 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

"This beautifully written book by Maryellen MacDonald demonstrates how 'word-work' shapes both our experience of the world and the very brain that produced our capacity to articulate and generate our ...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, kids must read outside of school. Educators know this, sometimes tell parents/caregivers, who sometimes have the resources/interest/time to promote home reading. Estimates of kids' reading (aka print/text exposure) predict reading skill big time. One example from the research lit: rdcu.be/eJTI3

Effects of individual differences in text exposure on sentence comprehension

Scientific Reports - Effects of individual differences in text exposure on sentence comprehension

rdcu.be

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 9d

A subject-verb agreement error, right in the headline! A little irony here is that some of us analyzed patterns of these errors to argue against strict "Words and Rules" approaches to language use that were favored by...Well, iykyk @drlearnasaurus.bsky.social @heidilorimor.bsky.social

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcc.bsky.social · 11d

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?

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Caroline Rowland @carorowland.bsky.social · 13d

Learning the moment-to-moment, fast-paced dance of turn-taking in conversation is tricky. Imme, Maartje, Middy and I show how 2 year old (Dutch) kids track pronoun use to predict who is gonna speak next in an interaction. Just published in JECP. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

From age two, children use pronouns to predict who will speak next in conversation

Children’s exposure to language is shaped by interactional needs in conversation. Prior research has largely focused on how such language influences w…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Robert Hawkins @rdhawkins.bsky.social · 13d

"The models are trained on three dialogue corpora in English and Japanese, where backchannels and fillers are preserved and annotated, to investigate how fine-tuning can help LMs learn their representations."

arxiv.org/abs/2509.20237

Investigating the Representation of Backchannels and Fillers in Fine-tuned Language Models

Backchannels and fillers are important linguistic expressions in dialogue, but are under-represented in modern transformer-based language models (LMs). Our work studies the representation of them in l...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Falk Huettig @falkhuettig.bsky.social · 13d

In a new paper, Mike Tanenhaus and I articulate the rationale behind different experimental tasks in the visual world paradigm and give recommendations for future studies. “Rethinking task importance in the Visual World Paradigm“ (Brain Research, in press). pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i...

pure.mpg.de

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

BogaertsLab @bogaertslab.bsky.social · 14d

Curious about the human ability to extract regularities from sensory input (i.e., “statistical learning”) and individual differences therein? #CognitiveScience #Learning

Our #Consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide 🌎 💬 🌍 💬 🌏 💬:
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 14d

Ah, the curse of interdisciplinarity. Also autocorrect.

Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Vitória Piai @vipiai.bsky.social · 14d

New chapter on sentence production in "Speaking: The Free Book" bookdown.org/v_piai_resea... beautifully written by @drlearnasaurus.bsky.social Go check, very useful resource for free (!) for teaching & initiating folks on topic of language production (usually missing from textbooks on "language"!)

bookdown.org

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 14d

So fun to talk about talking with @kleonard.bsky.social of Chicago's The Second City Improv on the "Getting to Yes, And" Podcast. A wonderful discussion about the value of talking, listening, comedy, improvisation! On the podcast apps or here on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=MElx...

Master The Art Of Talking With Anyone Easily

YouTube video by Yes, And The Second City

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Fernanda Ferreira @fernandaedi.bsky.social · 15d

New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Planning to be incremental: Scene descriptions reveal meaningful clustering in language production

How do speakers plan complex descriptions and then execute those plans? In this work, we attempt to answer this question by asking subjects to describ…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Edith Kaan @edithkaan.bsky.social · 24d

The Linguistics Department at the University of Florida has an opening for a lecturer in General Linguistics, starting Fall 2026. Come join our team!

explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

University of Florida - Details - LECTURER

explore.jobs.ufl.edu

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 28d

Yes. There are other factors at play, but the (imperfect) Gleitman et al. (2007, JML) attention capture study showed that subliminally directing attention to agent/theme affected structure. A gen'l bias to 👀 left 1st should yield structure that allows the 1st fixated object to be 1st in utterance

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 28d

fwiw, Kay Bock, when she gave me some pictures years ago, said it was important to counterbalance pic orientation because of L-R bias. Also in this study we found a Left bias in nonlinguistic action (touching locations on a touch screen), fyi. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

Frontiers | Is Language Production Planning Emergent From Action Planning? A Preliminary Investigation

The nature of syntactic planning for language production is generally thought to reflect language-specific processes, but an alternative is that syntactic pl...

www.frontiersin.org

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · 29d

So sorry, Kirby. I'm sure she had a great life with you.

Reposted by Maryellen MacDonald

Fernanda Ferreira @fernandaedi.bsky.social · 29d

UCDavis Psych is hiring an Assistant Professor in Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠✨

Come join a vibrant, collaborative dept and live in a fun college town near Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa, and Lake Tahoe. Applications due Oct.21.

Please share widely!

recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

Assistant Professor of Psychology - Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ucdavis.edu

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Sep 5

Thanks, Adam! Yes, I emphasize benefits of all forms of talking, but writing in particular often gives us the best return. Writing's reflection, comparative slowness, & effort all amplify learning and insight. As @biblioracle.bsky.social says, offloading writing to AI dulls the value for students.

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Sep 2

I'm a recently retired cognitive psychologist, still active in thinking and writing. I'd be happy to talk, but maybe you're looking for Brits? I'm in the US

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Sep 2

Aislinn Keogh @mandolinguist.bsky.social gave my new book to her mother to help her understand some of Aislinn's research area. Her mother is in a book-crochet group; she loved the book so much that she made a blanket (aka granny) square inspired by the book cover! This is so fantastic and touching!

Two part photo showing the book cover for More Than Words on the left and a crocheted square on the right that was inspired by the book.

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Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Aug 29

Same, but with yawning.

White cat named Wyatt yawning at the top of a bookcase

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Aug 26

More anecdotes: I study talking, so ppl tell me about the talking they observe. Some teachers have said that kids used to file into class talking up a storm, but now many come in silent, looking at their phones. I would love to know research tracking amount and change in kids' talking over time.

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Aug 26

Your folks aren't alone. There's lots of research showing that on average everyone's ability to make new friends declines with age. One discussion: www.apa.org/news/podcast...

www.apa.org

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Aug 26

Nice study on the value of science communication!

Allie Sinclair @asinclair.bsky.social · Aug 4

📣 New preprint from the SCIMaP team!

Across three studies, we show that communicating the economic impact of NIH funding cuts—especially with interactive quizzes and maps—decreases approval and motivates action to oppose the cuts, across the political spectrum. 🧵 1/8
osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Aug 26

The Second City improv theater conducts improv exercises helping police attend to *all* of what people say. Though we can sometimes predict final words, the ends of utterances are where speakers put important NEW info. That's the how talk-planning works! tucson.com/news/nation-...

Comedy and crime fighting join forces for police learning leadership skills

Officials at the University of Chicago Crime Lab's Policing Leadership Academy brought in members of storied improv theater The Second City to teach police leaders the skills found in improv.

tucson.com

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Aug 25

Example of how comprehenders have time and capacity to predict producers' ends of utterances imgs.xkcd.com/comics/predi...
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/predi...

cartoon in which a person on stilts asks for help and person on the ground guesses that it's help to get down from stilts