Psycholinguist, feminist, social democrat, runner, cycling advocate. Made in Portugal, raised in Canada, living and working in California. Childless cat lady.
Oh hey I have some news: this daughter of a seamstress and a construction worker is now a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science!
Re-reading Fodor, Pylyshyn, and Johnson-Laird for the grad class I'm teaching this quarter makes me nostalgic for a time when we thought hard about the foundations of psychology and cognitive science. Even if you disagree with their answers, they were asking the right questions.
Excited (and a tiny bit nervous) to announce that this very short psycholinguist just signed a contract with Oxford University Press to write a Very Short Introduction to Psycholinguistics!
Yay, 10 more followers and I hit 5K! Should I tweet about (a) the replication crisis (too 2018?)? (b) why academia sucks (but if I’m honest I don’t really think so)? Or (c) *pause for effect* the book contract I’m about to sign?📖⌨️🎉
How many thousands of dollars do we academics lose because the labyrinthian purchase order systems at our university exasperate us to the point where we say screw it I’ll pay for this myself? I mean come on, I’m just trying to order some Kleenex for the lab
I used to react to the Nobel Prize announcements with awe and admiration for the winners, but now what I see is an outmoded view of the scientific method that primarily celebrates white men.
Why are
@APA
journal articles so hard to access from on campus? In return for the huge subscription fees universities pay, you'd think APA would make sure campus members have easy one-click access. Instead, they're one step away from making us travel to DC just to read a paper.
New rule: if you review a conference abstract restricted to two pages and all the space is used, any criticism that additional detailed information should have been provided must be accompanied by a description of what should have been left out.
Guys, my father had a Doctorate, which he worked hard for and was a huge deal, especially given his background. He also felt that being called “Doctor” outside a specific professional setting was overkill and in that sense actually kind of diminishing.
At some point academia must reckon with the massive timesink that is grant writing. Not only is 2/3 of the application bureaucratic blah blah blah, most of which nobody bothers to read, but now it seems the research proposal itself is largely irrelevant.
Here are some: Attentional blink, change detection, statistical learning, DRM false memory, levels of processing, mental rotation, monty hall, prototypes, garden-path effects, serial position curve, serial/parallel visual search, Wason selection--and these are Coglab replications
In the interests of promoting some of the classic psycholinguistic literature, I'm wondering how many of you are acquainted with this 1976 article by John Morton:
My father used to tell people that once I finished my “course” (my PhD) I’d be returning to my hometown to live and work. When I explained to him what academia is really like he couldn’t understand why I was getting so much education to end up with so few choices.
If from age 13 on women can cope with wearing a tight binding around their midsection with metal hooks in the back for 8-16 hours a day, I think you'll survive wearing a cloth face mask in the grocery store for 25 minutes.
In a study of 6M journal articles, male lead authors were 21% more likely than female lead authors to use superlatives like "novel", "first", "excellent", "remarkable" to describe their work. Papers that used this positive framing were cited 13% more often.
I'm so devastated by this news I can barely type out the sentence: Janet Fodor, the brilliant, elegant, kind, amazing Janet Fodor, is gone. She passed away on Monday. There's been so much bad news of this sort lately, but this one feels like being stabbed in the heart.
I'm about to fly to Winnipeg to take care of the latest stage of my mother's sad journey with dementia. She is now in need of round-the-clock care. As I prepare for my trip, I thought I'd tell you all about my mother, or maybe just a few things about her that should be preserved.
Given the news from the US supreme court this week it’s hard to feel 100% celebratory, but I am incredibly grateful for this recognition, and I’m even more energized to keep working to make our corner of the world a better and fairer place.
It brings us great pleasure to announce that Fernanda Ferreira (University of California, Davis, USA) has just been named a recipient of the 2023 Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award. Congratulations, Fernanda!
@fernandaedi
The sweetest five words in the English language: "We have approved your sabbatical!"🎉🍾🥳This 2021-22 I'll be enjoying my very first full year sabbatical and only the second sabbatical of my career! Got the reading/writing/thinking projects all ready to go 📚💻📓
Inspired by
@IrisVanRooij
, I want to express some concerns that may be controversial and even outrageous to some but I feel we at least should have a discussion. I'm wondering if statistics in psycholinguistics could use a rethink. It feels like the tail now wags the dog.
Amazing to wake up to the news that I'm now a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society
@cogsci_soc
! Thrilled to be in such distinguished company, and so grateful to
@asifa_majid
for putting me forward!
Fellow psycholinguists: Who's doing psycholinguistic work (broadly defined) on understudied languages (broadly defined)? Some names come to my mind but I'd love a more comprehensive list. TIA!
What makes our aesthetic perceptions so immediate and yet so malleable? Take this image--how does the brain instantly see this scene as appealing in one era and unattractive in another? Or we laugh at 80s clothes and hair, but at the time we thought we looked great, right?
Hey, if you’re an F31 reviewer and you assert that a 3rd year grad student who already has two pubs and who has had to do most of her grad training in a pandemic has too few pubs, you’re a horrible person. And NIH, horrible people don’t belong on review panels.
Does anything better capture the irrelevance of academic, for-profit publishers like T&F and Elsevier than their inability to properly implement the proof corrections we take so much time and effort to identify for them, and that they demand with such urgency?
Growing up I remember hearing that marriage is work and thinking, well then what’s the point of that? Fortunately, those folks were wrong—instead it turned out to be 36 years of fun and adventure, and we’re just getting started!
I have to laugh at the baby-boomers freaking out over the prospect of a 60% tax rate on the wealthy, which is the rate that was in place when they were young and that created the programs from which they've benefited most of their lives and which they now defend so vigorously.
This thread is perfect. It captures exactly how I feel about kids: I love them, love spoiling them, hanging out with them, buying gifts for them. I'm for generous parental leave & taxes to support public schools. I just never wanted to have kids myself. Three cheers for aunties!
I’m 37, and I don't want kids and I’m in a period of my life in which many of my friends—if not most of them—either have kids or plan to have kids.
(thread)
Thrilled to announce the publication of our article "Psycholinguistics" in the new Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science: . The best part: my amazing brother Vic Ferreira and I are co-authors - our 1st paper together! Read it here:
Been noticing more reviewers writing in a playful, conversational, but still respectful style, and I love it! Somewhere in our training we learned reviews should sound cold and bossy, but the best ones are friendly and collaborative. Bonus: it's more fun to write this way too!
Want to do cool science, hang out with wonderful, supportive people, and live in a bike-friendly college town in northern California? Then come be a postdoc in our lab!
Check out our website for details (click on link below the photo):
“In 2017, my colleagues and I submitted a paper to your journal. After one full year during which we heard nothing about the status of our submission, we received a desk reject with no explanation. I wrote to you asking for information and you did not reply.
In other words, no.”
Fellow language researchers: Here it is, the promised database of psycholinguists investigating understudied languages. But first let me state that this is all the work of Anirudh Murugesan,
@anirudhm_24
, one of the brilliant undergrads working in my lab. Thank you, Ani!
Fellow psycholinguists: Who's doing psycholinguistic work (broadly defined) on understudied languages (broadly defined)? Some names come to my mind but I'd love a more comprehensive list. TIA!
Hey, you know the linearization problem in language production? Well you'll be hearing a lot about it over the next five years! With
@JhendersonIMB
,
@gweezlouise
, &
@mbarkyy
!
75% of my work life seems to consist of hunting down zoom links, creating zoom links, asking people if they've set up the zoom link, and closing zoom tabs on my browser.
This is a tough Mother’s Day. I have my mother, but I’m losing her slowly, day by day, and it breaks my heart. Here we are in 2019 celebrating our birthdays (yes, I was born on the day she turned 22). Happy Mother’s Day, mum. Thank you for everything.
Another reason to practice Open Science: lab member was preparing materials for OSF, which included testing scripts by re-running analyses. This led to discovery of an error, which we now can fix before submitting. Sharing makes you careful, and meticulousness makes good science!
The Toddler Nephew wants to go somewhere he's not supposed to, ends up demonstrating his understanding of compositionality and semantic contrast:
Dad: Nobody goes down there!
TN: Yesbody goes down there!
My fellow Americans: how about we require letters of recommendation only once candidates reach at least the longlist stage, as is standard practice in other countries?
I’d love to look at people’s eye movements when they receive an email or letter notifying them of a decision. If others are like me, reading is impossible—instead you do visual search for keywords (happy/pleased/delighted/accept/yes vs. sorry/regret/disappointed/no)
Loki (2005-2022): Extraordinary gentleman, world traveler, bon vivant, and the best buddy anyone could ask for. Saying goodbye was incredibly painful, but we think he had a good life, and he certainly brought us joy every day we were together.
PI shows me a slick new online experiment setup programmed by one of his brilliant PhD students. I ask if I can share it with my lab. He replies "you'll have to ask her"! This is how good PIs behave: they respect their trainees' work and treat them like pros. (PI=
@JhendersonIMB
)
Would love for folks to recommend their favorite overview articles / chapters / blog posts on any topic in cognition, appropriate for use in a large undergrad cog psych class (to replace traditional $$$ textbook). In exchange, I'll compile the recs and share as a google doc!
Fellow academics: Nature is launching yet another new journal, and the open access fee is 9500 euros. The only way to fight these predatory Nature journals is to boycott them: don’t submit to them, don’t review for them, don’t cite them.
Feeling really low as I mark the one-year anniversary of moving my mother into a memory care facility. Plus, due to omicron, I’m about to go online to cancel my flight to see her. These are grim times.
I’ve been struggling with how to describe the impact Jerry Fodor had on my life…this isn’t really adequate, but I remember as a 20-yr old reading the Language of Thought and being totally blown away; all I could think was “I want to be part of this world”. Thank you, Jerry. RIP.
When I teach undergrad cog psych, on day one I show a figure and say “first we scrutinize the axes.” Repeat for every class, every graph. By end of course students smile as soon as I show a new fig, but later tell me it’s one of the most valuable real-world lessons they learned.
I'd pay good money for an app that takes a standard linguistics article as input, locates the acronyms, abbreviations, and initial translations, and then creates a new, acronym/abbreviation-free version as output.
@court_breiner
When I was getting ready to go away to grad school my immigrant mother threw an informal "shower" for me, pointing out to everyone that it was at least as important to celebrate educational milestones as marriages and births.
As Chair of the
@Psychonomic_Soc
Publications Committee, I’m proud to announce that, beginning in 2019, articles published in Psychonomic Society journals will include an Open Practices Statement. Stay tuned for an announcement on the PS website!
#OpenScience
From now on, can we acknowledge that reporting partial voter tallies in elections leads to the same kind of mischief as peeking at your data before you’ve reached your target n?
In academia, a person's work might be viewed as unfit to be published or funded, but that same person's judgment is seen as more than adequate to provide peer review (sometimes in the same week!). Does this mean academic scholarship assumes a comprehension / production asymmetry?
But think about that kind of bravery and self-confidence. Think of the sense of adventure behind these life decisions. Think of the sacrifice, the hard work, the resilience, and the discipline. Most of all, think of the hope.
Thanks, everyone, for your very kind words!
I should have clarified that this isn’t the final version of the book cover - for one thing, it won’t be white - but it’s still a huge thrill to see what was merely a vague idea a couple of years ago turn into something real!
Today at
#CUNY2021
@linguistbrian
and
@fernandaedi
announced the soft opening of Glossa Psycholinguistics. GP is an open access journal that considers brief reports, longer reports, registered reports, and theoretical reviews. Please retweet and follow us here on Twitter!
Can anyone recommend a reading that explains in plain language what LLMs are, how they work, etc.? Something that would be suitable for assigning in a large undergraduate psych/cogsci class?
This cool new paper highlights the need to study diverse languages in psycholinguistics. Do people predict in comprehension and do they plan ahead in production? For Nungon, the answers are no and yes respectively, challenging current views. More work like this please!
New paper! Does how far in advance you plan your speech depend on what language you speak? We explore this in Nungon, a language with ~1000 speakers in remote villages in Papua New Guinea 🧵 1/
#psycholinguistics
#understudiedLanguages
#nungon
It never fails. Male colleague to me: “Please send me the revised document by Friday.” Me to male colleague (or pretty much anyone else I work with): “Would it be possible for you to send me the revised document by Friday? Thanks so much!”
When you hear “prediction in language” you think meaning, right? But what about syntactic prediction? In this new paper
@ZQ_Harvey
and I discuss its key role in language processing and review evidence for robust prediction of syntactic categories.
Many of us grew up speaking a language we later pushed aside or even abandoned as we pursued success, and our older selves grieve all that's been lost. To learn more about this, read
@JulieSedivy
's new book Memory Speaks, which I reviewed here:
…
As part of our efforts to promote access to the
@Psychonomic_Soc
annual meetings, the keynote and two symposia will be live-streamed this year and available for later viewing. Details here:
When discussing a funded project, please don’t bellow out the amount as if it’s some indicator of the work’s quality or importance. Money worship has damaged science as much as it’s harmed other sectors of our society. Tell us what the work is about instead.
LSA member and current visiting Professor at Harvard University, Uli Sauerland, as well as two linguist colleagues have been awarded an NSF ERC Synergy grant with total funding amounting to over 10 million Euro! Read more about their research below:
Woke up this morning to the incredibly sad news that the very first person to do graduate work with me recently passed away. I’m feeling a version of what people say about parents and children-you don’t expect to say goodbye to your students.