Steven Moran

New preprint w/ @stivits, "Minimal Viable Sound Systems for Language"! We refute the vocal learning hypothesis for speech evolution, showing how it misrepresents and mispredicts great ape & human sound repertoires and needed requirements for language. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/vie…

Sad to be missing #INTERSPEECH2024 but Daniel Friedrichs will be presenting our paper on Weds! ➡️ Temporal co-registration of simultaneous EMA and EEG for precise articulatory and neural data alignment ⏰ Weds, 15:10-15:30 📍Panacea Amphitheater @stivits @MonicaLanchero3

Morpho-phonetics: our new approach to studying the biological evolution of speech sounds. Take a look at our manuscript: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

And for the second time today, a new paper. This one in @SciReports, with @lameira_adriano, @stivits, @CKAGannon on syllabic utterances by two chimpanzees, refuting the idea that chimpanzees are precluded from coupling movements of the jaw and larynx. nature.com/articles/s4159…

@SimonJGreenhill @NataliaLevshina So what about preprints? I still work with a lot of people who feel strongly one way or another, precisely because they aren't really published, so the ideas could be stolen. On the other hand, if reviewers have already seen the work and rejected it, the ideas can also be stolen.

I do a lot of reviewing. Mainly because it helps me keep up with the recent developments and learn useful things. But this work sometimes pays off in unexpected ways... A while ago I was reviewing a paper submitted to a journal. One illustration looked strangely familiar... 1/5

Nice to see our research highlighted together with super interesting findings from @EFPrimatology in L'uniscope (wp.unil.ch/uniscope/dix-d…). Great job @Jiang_Zifan! @AdrianSoldati, @isaacschamberg, @lameira_adriano

Swiss NLP Award to Alessia Battisti, @ebling_sarah, Anne Göhring, @Jiang_Zifan, @amitmoryossef, @bricksdont , @SantMuniesa, @arios272 and the colleagues @PerrollazRegula, Sandra Sidler-Miserez, Katja Tissi at HfH for their work in sign language machine translation. 4/4

Two new papers with @stivits @Freudian__Slap et al. from this week’s FONETIK 2024 conference in Stockholm! - Vocal tract proportions and the evolution of speech zenodo.org/records/113960… - Anatomical correlates of articulatory ranges of motion zenodo.org/records/113960…

Hey @googledocs are you suggesting that I switch to British English? Pretty sure I _spelled_ that right.🤔

The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive (archive.phonetics.ucla.edu) is one of the first massively multilingual speech corpora w/ audio from >300 languages. Tomorrow we’ll be presenting the VoxAngeles Corpus with audited phonetic transcriptions and alignments for ~100 languages #lreccoling24

3. Dimensions of structure and variability in the human vocal tract w/ Katherine Vaughan-Williams & Steve Moran @stivits samkirkham.github.io/pdf/ISSP2024_v…

@DDL_Laboratoire @CNRSshs @CNRS_dr07 Great opportunities to do a PhD with Matthias Urban (ddl.cnrs.fr/annuaires/inde…), who is fantastic to work with!

🚨 Two PhD positions available in the new ERC Project "LANGUAGE REDUX" hosted by @DDL_Laboratoire: language geography of language isolates and Eurasian languages. 🗺️🤓 Apply until June 21st! - emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctora… - emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctora… @CNRSshs @CNRS_dr07

@stivits and I are pleased to inform that our Research Topic "The Adaptive Value of Languages: Non-linguistic Causes of Language Diversity, volume II" has been published as an e-book, which is now freely available online Enjoy and share! frontiersin.org/research-topic…

Why more languages doesn't guarantee more linguistic diversity? How can we measure linguistic diversity in NLP benchmarks? Find out in our new pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2403.03909 @XimGutierrez @chrisbentz1 @stivits @olgapelloni

@stivits and I have finally produced the editorial piece for our @FrontPsychol Research Topic on the non–linguistic causes of language diversity 👉 The editorial is accesible here: osf.io/preprints/psya… 👉 The Research Topic can be browsed here: frontiersin.org/research-topic…

@johnbasil Use what the language users prefer to use.

Any recommendations for practical orthography of close central unrounded vowel [ɨ]? Obvs depends on what else is going on in the phonology, but the other vowels are canonical. Not much diphthongs I don't think. I'm thinking maybe <eu>?

This week's student spotlight is Axel G. Ekström (@Freudian__Slap), who studies speech production from comparative and evolutionary perspectives, including vocal production comparisons across great ape species (Pan troglodytes, Pongo abelii, & Gorilla gorilla).

New paper by Hadi Khalilia and colleagues, "Lexical diversity in kinship across languages and dialects"(doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.…) in our ( @abenitezburraco) RT in Frontiers. Special thanks to @SamPassmore_ and @DanielleBarth1!