iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

3-year-old: Daddy, can you teach me to roast marshmallows? Me: Of course, I'd be happy t- 3YO: Because when I grow up YOU'LL DIE

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Ashley Symons @ashleysymons.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Briefly surfacing from mat leave to celebrate a new paper with @adamtierney.bsky.social, Fred Dick, and Lori Holt! We found that salient acoustic and linguistic features of task-irrelevant speech distort subjective time. Excited to see this work finally out there! psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...

psycnet.apa.org

APA PsycNet

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

This paper has something for everyone. Salience! Time perception! Linguistic surprisal! Synchronized tapping!

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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

🚨New paper🚨 about the link between cue weighting and dimension-selective attention doi.org/10.1016/j.co... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social Fred Dick, Kazuya Saito, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5 #neuroskyence #psychscisky

doi.org

Redirecting

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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

🚨New paper🚨 about accented speech perception doi.org/10.1016/j.ba... by brilliant (MSc student at the time!) Amir Ghooch Kanloo accompanied by myself, Kazuya Saito and @adamtierney.bsky.social from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social 🧵1/5

doi.org

Redirecting

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Daniel Yon @danieljamesyon.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

ECR looking for a change in the New Year? We are recruiting a new Lecturer in Psychology at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social ! If you’d like to talk about life in the Department, please do feel free to get in touch. Deadline 8th Feb - More details below 👇 cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

cis7.bbk.ac.uk

Lecturer in Psychology (2303) - Birkbeck, University of London

Birkbeck

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Ashley Symons @ashleysymons.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

📄 New paper out! It’s long been known that listeners reweight acoustic cues in speech when cue reliability changes. Here @adamtierney.bsky.social, Kyle Jasmin, and I show that this can happen instantly after a single exposure to 'accented' speech. tinyurl.com/mwt6usdw @rhulpsychology.bsky.social

tinyurl.com

Speech perception strategies shift instantly

To perceive speech listeners must decide how to prioritize information from multiple acoustic dimensions. Over the course of language learning, indivi…

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Psyche Loui @psycheloui.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

New paper 🚨! Our class project on Illusions of the Mind: Laurel vs. Yanny and Sometimes Behave So Strangely #speech2songillusion now out www.nature.com/articles/s41... with 3 undergrad, 2 postgrad, & 1 postdoc, & 3 PI authors #musicscience

nature.com

Laurel–Yanny percept affects the speech-to-song illusion, but musical anhedonia does not - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Laurel–Yanny percept affects the speech-to-song illusion, but musical anhedonia does not

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Ayelet Landau @ayeletlandau.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

📣cog neuro postdoc opportunity! Interested in studying attention & exploration w/ cutting edge M/EEG? 🧠care about making vision science a bit more naturalistic? 🌱LandauLab is hiring! We seek resourceful, curious and creative researchers who can join the newly forming London-based team@ucl.ac.uk! ...

ucl.ac.uk

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

The kid has started calling me “cool dad” whenever he wants something. This is startlingly effective emotional manipulation

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Emma Holmes @emmaholmes90.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

New *Funded PhD opportunity* for UK students to work with me at UCL (London), researching auditory training interventions to improve speech understanding in noisy environments. Deadline 28th April. Full details and job description: bit.ly/4ccbbzj @uclpals.bsky.social [please share]

bit.ly

Divisional Vacancies

Job Vacancies in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

There's a PhD studentship opportunity available at the Birkbeck School of Psychological Sciences! 4 years, funded by working as a graduate teaching assistant. Feel free to get in touch if you have questions. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMD691/p...

jobs.ac.uk

PhD Studentship & Graduate Teaching Assistant at Birkbeck, University of London

Apply now for the PhD Studentship & Graduate Teaching Assistant role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Having a kid really drives home how we're all linguistically complacent, settling for mediocrity when we should be innovating to realize the full potential of language. Anyway he called baby ducks "ducklets" this morning and I'd like to request that we all switch to that from now on

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

New preprint! Musical aptitude and experience, pitch discrimination, and neural encoding of speech harmonics are linked to the ability to perceive prosody in Mandarin-accented speech. Led by Amir Hossein Ghooch Kanloo (his MSc dissertation!) osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

New preprint! Do individuals with musical anhedonia perceive illusory speech in song? Sort of! They rate all speech stimuli as less musical than controls, but hear increased musicality with repetition. And they don't like hearing speech, whether or not it transforms into song. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

New preprint! Listeners adjust their speech perception strategies after a single "accented" speech trial. However, these shifts in strategy vanish as quickly as they appear, lasting a single trial before returning to baseline. With @ashleysymons.bsky.social and Kyle Jasmin. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

New preprint! When listeners’ predictions about upcoming speech sounds fail, the subjective passage of time slows down. This suggests that people make linguistic predictions even when ignoring speech and prediction errors capture attention. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Auditory Neuroscience Lab @audioneurolab.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

⏰CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS⏰ We're looking for London-based #participants who would like to take part in an fMRI study and gain insight into how our brains process second language speech 🧠🧠🧠 #auditory #neuroscience @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social Contact @mkachlicka.bsky.social for details. Please share!

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

New preprint! This paper shows that the perceptual boundary between speech and song can shift due to the surrounding context. Specifically, speech/song categorization is affected by contrastive adaptation: perceptual movement away from the previous stimulus. osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

New preprint! We find grid-like coding in entorhinal cortex when participants complete a task requiring mental manipulation of the frequency and duration of sounds. This suggests that people use spatial circuits when thinking about sound. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Spatial coding supports auditory conceptual navigation

Grid cells in human entorhinal cortex encode spatial layouts for real-world navigation, yet their role in conceptual navigation remains unclear. Here we show that mentally transforming tones within a ...

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Catherine Sheard @sheardcat.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!) royalsociety.org/grants/newto...

royalsociety.org

Newton International Fellowships | Royal Society

This fellowship is for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK.

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

In trying to fix scientific publishing, maybe we could start with the small things? Like, say, counting work days instead of seven days a week when calculating review deadlines? I'm really sick of being told a review is due on Christmas, or on a Sunday

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

No drum in existence makes a sound that even remotely resembles “pa rum pa pum pum”. What drum can produce a nasal consonant? Drums do not have a nasal cavity. What kind of horribly cursed drum are we talking about here and why is it tormenting that baby

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

It's odd how strong the taboo is against certain stylistic elements in scientific writing. For example, I don't think I've ever read a scientific paper that contained an exclamation point! Or ellipses... What if I dared include them? Would an exclamation point doom an otherwise publishable paper???

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Ayelet Landau @ayeletlandau.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Excited to inaugurate my bluesky presence with this exciting preprint! Lead by the one and only Maya Inbar and together w Eitan Grossman we investigated temporal structure of prosodic units in over forty languages. Check out what we found! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low frequency rhythms and balance cross-linguistic syllable rate variability

Intonation units (IUs) are a universal building-block of human speech. They are found cross-linguistically and are tied to important language functions such as the pacing of information in discourse a...

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

I'm very grateful to my wife for helping me set up tierney.science, which I think really encapsulates my scientific philosophy

tierney.science

Science!

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

New preprint by @mkachlicka.bsky.social et al.! Perceptual strategies set by one's first language can make learning a second language difficult. Can short-term training change participants' strategies, potentially facilitating second language learning? The answer is sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

As someone who’s shy about dancing, it’s basically my worst nightmare that our toddler makes us dance for hours every night. “Dance, daddy! DANCE.”

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Am I the last person on earth who writes out references by hand? By which I mean type them out, but if I'm going to be that much of a neo-Luddite, maybe I should go Full Quill Pen

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

My number one writing tip is very simple: read your entire paper/grant proposal out loud just before you submit. Every time I do this I initially feel silly but then catch a dozen embarrassing errors. Writing is captured speech, so if you stumble over a passage when reading, something's wrong.

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

It's a bit odd that musical aptitude is commonly measured by asking listeners whether two musical sequences are the same. That's not something musicians do very often! If you'd like to instead measure melody/rhythm reproduction we've made open-source tests in Javascript/HTML: tinyurl.com/musRepro

tinyurl.com

Auditory processing - Reproduction - Google Drive

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Cool snail on York city walls. I don’t usually post snails but I had to make an exception for this one

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

There's a lecturer position open in the School of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck: cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/lect... I'm happy to answer any questions. In particular, if you're in the US and thinking of moving (for... some reason), I could share my perspective (I took that leap ten years ago).

cis7.bbk.ac.uk

Lecturer in Psychology (1800) - Birkbeck, University of London

Birkbeck

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

One thing I find surprising about my toddler's language development is how quickly chance errors get set in stone. For example, a couple of months ago he said "tangles" instead of "candles", and he has ever since refused to say "candles" no matter how many times we model the correct pronunciation

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

I wish Bluesky would make it easier to share audio. I guess the best way to do this now is to take the sound file and dump it into a dummy movie file but that was just enough work that I deleted the fun post about an unpublished sound illusion I was going to write. Now all that's left is this gripe

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Does anyone else feel like they have a special Voice they do when lecturing? Not intentionally, but involuntarily? Mine sort of sounds like Zapp Brannigan, or like I'm narrating a science documentary from the 1950s

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

One of my strongest opinions as a scientist--as a person--is that every acronym you use is a step away from understanding. Using an acronym is bad enough, but inventing one is a sin. Stop making me flip back to the beginning of your paper to understand what BPPMPPS means

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Hi new followers! Here are a few recent papers from the lab: @mkachlicka.bsky.social shows that Illusory transformation of speech into song is unaffected by language background, suggesting cross-cultural similarity in cues used to distinguish speech and music: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

Weighting of cues to categorization of song versus speech in tone-language and non-tone-language speakers

One of the most important auditory categorization tasks a listener faces is determining a sound's domain, a process which is a prerequisite for succes…

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ManyLanguages @manylanguagesc.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Some relevant news from the recently held @btscon.bsky.social: Yuto Ozaki presented a talk titled: “Global collaboration in exploring cross-cultural acoustic regularities between music and spoken language”. See the recording below 📼 www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKdl...

youtube.com

BTSCon 2024: Featured Talk Music and Spoken Language

YouTube video by Psychological Science Accelerator

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Nori Jacoby @norijacoby.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I am seeking PhD students to join my new lab at Cornell! Work with me at @co3lab.bsky.social on perception and internal representations, cultural evolution, large scale online experiments, cross cultural experiments or computational music cognition. Please contact me ASAP if you are interested!

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 16/05/2024

Our "Many Voices" 75-author collaboration led by Yuto Ozaki finding global regularities in music-speech relationships is now out on the cover of Science Advances: science.org/doi/10.1126/... Full video of 18 coauthors singing/speaking in our own languages at youtu.be/a4eNNrdcfDM

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