“Hooked on Celebri[ɾ]y”

T-glottaling in Scotland has been studied as a salient linguistic variable, which has been found to index (in)formality, socio-economic class, and region, among other speaker and situational characteristics. Realisations of /t/ have also been studied in a musical context, where they have been found to be linked to genre and identity. This study examines Scottish singer-songwriter Nina Nesbitt, and her realisations of the intervocalic /t/ variable in both speech and song. She shows high rates of t-glottaling in speech, but within song, her realisations vary; the only significant predictor of /t/ realisations is song genre, where pop and pop folk songs favour [ɾ] realisations and acoustic songs favour the [t] realisation. T-glottaling is uncommon in all genres of her music. I argue that this variability is a strategy employed to create coherent musical identities that situate Nesbitt within the musical marketplaces in which she performs

Examining the female-talker default in experimental language acquisition research

Experimental research on language acquisition and development regularly employs auditory stimuli as part of the methodology. This project analyses the apparent standard practice of using female speakers to produce these experimental materials and the potential consequences of such a practice. To situate the discussion in the current scientific landscape we present a systematic review of published literature between 2017 and 2022 to establish how prevalent this practice is. The review finds a strong bias in favour of female-spoken stimuli across publications in a curated set of nine journals. We discuss this result in light of gender-based workplace inequality, changing caregiver expectations and the reliability of infants' assumed female voice preference. This project seeks to encourage researchers to consider how diversifying the stimuli used in these types of studies would lead to both a more inclusive and representative research landscape, as well as ensure that our research results are generalizable

CAW-coref: Conjunction-Aware Word-level Coreference Resolution

State-of-the-art coreference resolutions systems depend on multiple LLM calls per document and are thus prohibitively expensive for many use cases (e.g., information extraction with large corpora). The leading word-level coreference system (WL-coref) attains 96.6% of these SOTA systems' performance while being much more efficient. In this work, we identify a routine yet important failure case of WL-coref: dealing with conjoined mentions such as 'Tom and Mary'. We offer a simple yet effective solution that improves the performance on the OntoNotes test set by 0.9% F1, shrinking the gap between efficient word-level coreference resolution and expensive SOTA approaches by 34.6%. Our Conjunction-Aware Word-level coreference model (CAW-coref) and code is available at https://github.com/KarelDO/wl-coref.Comment: Accepted at CRAC 202

‘Sally the Congressperson’: The Role of Individual Ideology on the Processing and Production of English Gender-Neutral Role Nouns

Language and gender are inextricably linked; we regularly make reference to the genders of individuals around us, and the language used to do so recursively feeds the biases we hold about gender in the social world. What has been left under-investigated is the role that individual, rather than societally-held, ideologies about gender play in the linguistic system. In two web-based studies, we investigate the processing and production of gender-neutral role nouns such as congressperson as a function of individual gender ideology and political alignment. Our results indicate an asymmetry between the processing and production of such nouns: while individuals’ gender ideologies do not modulate processing, they do interact with political party in production tasks such that Democratic participants with more progressive gender ideologies produce more gender-neutral role nouns. We argue that these forms have become linguistic resources for indexing social progressiveness, leading to their use by Democrats and avoidance by Republicans

In what sense does 'nothing make sense except in the light of evolution'?

Dobzhansky argued that biology only makes sense if life on earth has a shared history. But his dictum is often reinterpreted to mean that biology only makes sense in the light of adaptation. Some philosophers of science have argued in this spirit that all work in ‘proximal’ biosciences such as anatomy, physiology and molecular biology must be framed, at least implicitly, by the selection histories of the organisms under study. Others have denied this and have proposed non-evolutionary ways in which biologists can frame these investigations. This paper argues that an evolutionary perspective is indeed necessary, but that it must be a forward-looking perspective informed by a general understanding of the evolutionary process, not a backward-looking perspective informed by the specific evolutionary history of the species being studied. Interestingly, it turns out that there are aspects of proximal biology that even a creationist cannot study except in the light of a theory of their effect on future evolutio