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Reposted by Michael Pleyer

Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 11d

New article from the lab, suggesting to me a way in which children's autobiographical memory may differ from their event memory more generally--
Autobiographical memory in children: relation to neural white matter www.tandfonline.com/eprint/B7FZ8...

www.tandfonline.com

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Reposted by Michael Pleyer

Stefan Hartmann @stefanhartmann.bsky.social · 20d

The first of the three corpora of German-English bilingual children's early speech that we've been working on for the last few years is finally publicly available! 🥳 🎉 talkbank.org/childes/acce...

CHILDES English-German MPI-EVA-Leipzig Corpus

talkbank.org

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Reposted by Michael Pleyer

Stefan Hartmann @stefanhartmann.bsky.social · 12d

It's been a while since I've written a book review - here's our review of Herbst & Hoffmann (2024), my first but definitely not last collaboration with the brilliant @bbunzeck.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S136... ($)

Thomas Herbst and Thomas Hoffmann, A Construction Grammar of the English language: CASA – a constructionist approach to syntactic analysis (Cognitive Linguistics in Practice 5). Amsterdam and Philadel...

doi.org

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Reposted by Michael Pleyer

Theresa Heyd @theresaheyd.bsky.social · 13d

Vorankündigung:

Im Wintersemester 2025/2026 finden erstmalig die Heidelberg Gender Lectures statt. Mit Gastvorträgen von Sabine_ Hark (TU Berlin) und Carolin Müller-Spitzer (IDS Mannheim), sowie Beiträgen der Heidelberger Gender & Queer Studies.

Mark your calendars, das wird wundervoll!

Plakat Heidelber Gender Lectures, weiß und blau, mit Details

Heidelberg Gender Lectures

29. Oktober, Alte Aula: Sabine_ Hark: Gefährliche Erbschaften. Sex/Gender: Biologische Fundierung und das Begehren nach Kategorien
Eröffnung & Auftakt Gender Studies CAS (anschließend Empfang)

05. November Miriam Neuhausen & Corinna Assmann: Out-rageous bodies: Unfolding the closet

19. November Ute Hüsken: Nuns and women in contemporary transcultural Buddhism

03. Dezember Renata Motta & Yaatsil Guevara Gonzalez: Geschmack der Grenze: Essen, Gender und Zugehörigkeit auf der Flucht

17. Dezember Brigitte Sölch: Kunstgeschichte und Feminismus

07. Januar Philipp-Thomas Wehage: Games & Gender – Implizites und explizites Spiel mit Geschlecht

21. Januar Karen Nolte: „WahnsinnsFrauen“ – Aneignungen von Hysterie in der Neuen Frauenbewegung

04. Februar Carolin Müller-Spitzer: Gender & Sprache im Deutschen unter empirisch-linguistischer Perspektive

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 13d

Kenny probably wins the prize for funniest sentence (about something that has actually happened) illustrating that the compositional nature of #language enables us to say things never uttered before
youtube.com/shorts/l6uFO...

Kenny in front of a slide of two people talking, one says "a fire breather fought off a marauding mariachi band in a turf war over tips"

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 13d

Super cool workshop on "Artificial Languages in the Linguist's Toolbox" at FU Berlin. 2nd talk is by @kennysmithed.bsky.social on "the relationship between frequency and irregularity in language change: an experimental approach using iterated artificial language learning"

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

One important aspect pointed out by Magdalena Wrembel: Multilingualism! Humans are naturally predisposed to learn multiple languages to a degree not found in other animals (who might learn to comprehend other systems used by different groups/species but much more limited, esp. In production)

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

A point made by several people is also that the question also reflects on positions of what is "innate" about language (emerges because genetically specified) and what emerged only through being emergent and scaffolded through cultural evolution and interaction

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

Theresa points out that unique shouldn't mean superior, every species has their own "unique" communication system and we should look at how ecological niches influence the emergence of what kind of system

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

One point that Neil made is that the question of course is what we mean by language (often people mean speech) and that we should look at the suite of building blocks of a multimodal language faculty. the suite has unique elements such as our ability to draw, potentially complex compositionality etc

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

But the combo is unique. Nikki makes an important point that language has become its own evolutionary system adapting to human minds/brains that evolves culturally and generates structure which seems to make it unique

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

I think one thing people agree on is that we need to know more about the ingredients and building blocks of language and then compare it to other human behaviours and animal behaviours. Theresa&Nikki stress that many(maybe all)building blocks are shared at least to some degree with different animals

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 14d

The Poznań #Linguistics Meeting 2025 Grand Debate: "Human #Language: is it unique?" feat. Wolfgang Dressler, Magdalena Wrembel, Raymond Hickey, Nikki Ritt, @thematzing.bsky.social and @neilcohn.bsky.social

The panel sitting together, Nikki online

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Reposted by Michael Pleyer

Kirby Conrod @kirbyconrod.bsky.social · 16d

Please boost! #linguistics student here at Swarthmore is running a survey for English speakers (who don't know Mandarin / any other tone languages) about how we learn tones. Take a few minutes to help out with this student research!
swarthmore.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Online Survey Software | Qualtrics Survey Solutions

Qualtrics sophisticated online survey software solutions make creating online surveys easy. Learn more about Research Suite and get a free account today.

swarthmore.az1.qualtrics.com

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 16d

Great plenary by @neilcohn.bsky.social at the 2025 Poznań #Linguistics Meeting: "Reimagining linguistic uniqueness in a multimodal paradigm"

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 27d

🚨 New Publication Alert! 🚨
Out now in #Language and #Linguistics Compass with
@stefanhartmann.bsky.social
& Antonio Benítez-Burraco:
"The role of play in language structure, acquisition and evolution" (this time with a working link)
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Role of Play in Language Structure, Acquisition and Evolution

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 27d

ah bugger, here's the working link:
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Role of Play in Language Structure, Acquisition and Evolution

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 27d

🚨 New Publication Alert! 🚨
Out now in Language and Linguistics Compass with @stefanhartmann.bsky.social & Antonio Benítez-Burraco:
"The role of play in language structure, acquisition and evolution"
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ln…

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Aug 29

Congratulations to Alexandra Bosshard for winning the #SLE2025 award for best presentation by a post-doctoral researcher with her excellent talk on processing perspectives in animal compositionality!

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Aug 28

But the data is complex and prediction success depends on the exact linguistic models and approaches and scale and more data for LLMs might change results for particular cases

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Aug 28

ah sorry live-tweeting is difficult. If I understood correctly, it is impressive how much LLMs achieve with "more compute and data" just based on embeddings data. linguists don't need LLM embeddings for models, which are weaker throughout, and can achieve better performance with other methods

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Aug 28

Petar's take home messages after showing that data driven linguistic behavioural profile models (that require A LOT of annotation) perform better than LLMs in predicting Polish aspect. Linguistics contributes meaningful knowledge but what LLMs is impressive.

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Aug 28

#SLE2025 plenary by @dagmardivjak.bsky.social & Petar Milin: Top-down wisdom versus bottom-up noise: can data (ever) replace linguistic expertise? Dagmar contrasts two ways of knowing language, in linguistics & machine learning. LLMs successfully generate & respond to text w/o linguistic insights

A slide comparing Linguistics and machine learning

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Reposted by Michael Pleyer

De Gruyter Brill Linguistics @dgb-linguistics.bsky.social · Aug 27

😊 Happy authors, happy publisher!

🎉 Congratulations to our author Carmelo Alessandro Basile for winning the prestigious Eugenio Coseriu Award presented by the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) at their 58th Annual Meeting in Bordeaux. #SLE2025

Photo of the author of the award-winning book "Modality in contact" holding a copy of the book in front of a table of De Gruyter Mouton books at the 2025 SLE Annual Meeting.

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Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · Aug 27

Roundtable discussion at #SLE2025 "How to do #linguistics with #AI, How to do #AI with #linguistics" with
@emilymbender.bsky.social , Claire Larsonneur, Benoît Le Blanc & Christian Ludwig

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