'that fundamental question of how we acquire language, that's still there. And it's gotten a little more interesting recently, ever since large language models like ChatGPT came into the picture.'

scientificamerican.com/article/elizab…

A neat study that shows how children adapt to the social and linguistic diversity of their environment--and how data on their adaptive processing can be perceived as a deficit or an asset depending on how it is measured and analyzed.

#diversity #speech

osf.io/bwcz7/

According to a survey, three out of four parents say raising children costs much more than initially thought. Many parents feel pressured to spend more than they can afford to meet society's expectations.

apple.news/AWWsfSL8kRW6H6…

Related languages diverge in their conceptualisation of landscape. Although sharing sensory associations, their emotion associations vary. English speakers sure seem to like anthropogenic features compared to French or German speakers! Philipp Striedl GC@UZH doi.org/10.1080/014263…

'The findings indicate that the principle of 'more is better' does not always apply to additional language support, and that identical learning materials may not be suitable for all students.'

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Dr. Lillian Durán and panelists on our assessment panel emphasized that to the extent feasible, schools should assess language and literacy in all languages students have access to. #TRLSummit2024

What if linguistic form and meaning are much more closely interwoven than we may have assumed?

What if, in fact, a large quantity of meaning can be derived merely from an accumulated volume of statistical associations of words in sentences?

HT Tai-Danae Bradley

languageandliteracy.blog/the-algebra-of…

Ponderings on the algebraic and statistical nature of language -- and how it superpowers #LLMs #AI .

write.as/manderson/the-…

Language nerds, ever wondered about what the 'statistical' is all about in 'statistical learning'?

Come for an explanation of the algebraic concatenation of words and statistical properties of language, and stay for the entropy.

Tai-Danae Bradley
Sean Carroll
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/1…

'It increased my self-confidence to see people who looked like me really doing well.'

quantamagazine.org/pleasure-or-pa…

Syntax and semantics are separable components of language processing in the brain.

Childhood poverty disrupts language processing neural networks in adulthood, after controlling for phonological awareness. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

“…the power of LLMs seemingly derives from the statistical power of language.”
#language #language development

'Users simply speak into a microphone installed onto a clear screen at the information desk. The #AI interpretation service then translates the user’s question into Korean, which is displayed on a monitor on the other side for an employee.'

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=63695&u…

There is something in the nature of language itself that seems to provide these computations of vast arrays of numbers with a lattice of our world, enabling LLMs to gain uncanny abilities from superpowered next word prediction.

languageandliteracy.blog/language-and-l…

What can LLMs tell us about #language ?

My new series dives into how Large Language Models (LLMs) may shed light on communication, computation, language, and learning.

#AI #LLMs #Language #Cognition

write.as/manderson/lang…

Really happy to announce our new (open access) paper was finally published today in Linguistics (journal)!

'Geographic structure of Chinese dialects: A computational dialectometric approach'

doi.org/10.1515/ling-2… 🔓

with He Huang (lead author), Lei Jia and Zhuo Chi

A short 🧵...

“The subway is the great leveler.”

'Results from the present study suggest that language-specific proficiency in the component skills of reading comprehension may play a critical role above and beyond chronology.'

HT Emily Solari

journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

'One of the main findings reveals that while the internal coach contributes to supporting the [teacher design teams’] progress, the support of the school leader is particularly crucial for sustainability.'

mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/4…