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Roman Feiman

@romanfeiman.bsky.social
2.3K followers 468 following 234 posts

Language, development, and language development. Assistant Prof at Brown. PI of the Brown Language and Thought (BLT) Lab.

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Reposted by Roman Feiman
Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I have a new preprint with Athulya Aravind. In it, we ask how can children learn the presuppositional meaning component of a word (e.g. "both" presupposing a |2| domain) Our claim... ...is that they can't. Presuppositional meanings are unlearnable. Preprint: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/010...
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 20/09/2026
“The arrangement would give Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a direct role in determining how NIH distributes its $48 billion in congressionally-appropriated money.” Bypassing the many checks and balances at NIH on grant funding decisions.
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Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.net · 17/09/2026
The Trump admin has decimated American science budgets, taking away life saving opportunities, and the potential for groundbreaking discoveries. This is how you destroy American innovation. apnews.com/article/trum...
apnews.com
Trump administration has cut or frozen $177 billion in grants across every state, analysis shows
An analysis finds that the Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $177 billion in federal grants since the president took office for his second term.
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Developing a plan that captures the best aspects of what NSF and NIH were while addressing some long-standing issues is what the effort at the @standupforscience.net policy shop is developing.
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Harrison Ritz @hritz.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Social Psychology: US: 23 CA: 2 Cognitive Psychology US: 36 CA: 1 (* no grad program) Same story for the past three years: ~1 Canadian job per year for cognitive psych/neuro. Amazing arbitrage opportunity for Canadian U15 schools to start hiring cog again!
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/09/2026
The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 13/09/2026
This will devastate our research+innovation capacity, bedrock of the 21st century economy. 35% of *all* employed people in the US with STEM PhD degrees are both foreign-born *and* graduated from a US university. —> nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/292... Shutting them out is extremist folly.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I don't think enough people know how hostile the legal US immigration system is (and already was, pre-Trump)
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Sanjay Srivastava @sanjaysrivastava.com · 28/08/2026
The U.S. is a massive funder of science. Canada does not come anywhere close. Stories about a handful of scientists get attention, but rather than "brain drain," the likely outcome if the U.S. continues its path is that there will simply be fewer scientists and less science getting done in the world
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Heinous. there should be serious investigations and trials after the Trump administration is over. Every future administration has to get the message that it can’t do stuff like this.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.
nature.com
Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades
The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.
All of the NSF’s directorates are awarding fewer new grants, but the hardest hit is the social, behavioural and economic sciences (SBE) directorate, which the White House proposed eliminating in its 2027 budget request to Congress. SBE has so far awarded 84 new grants this year, about 11% of its average, mainly in areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience and decision-making. Much of its portfolio, such as sociology, archaeology, political science, economics and geography, has received zero new awards. “I don’t think they’ve realized yet that there’s no awards,” one NSF staff member says of researchers in those fields. “That’s going to be clear soon.”
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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
“I was asked not to mention the Times at all. I’m choosing not to honor that norm, b/c silence abt how accountability journalism gets suppressed is itself a form of suppression.” Read the back story of how @nytimes.com and @thebulwark.com killed @adambonica.bsky.social’s piece. What a mf badass.
data4democracy.substack.com
With Fear and Favor
Institutions don’t have courage. They have incentives.
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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵
The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
A new venue for work at the intersection of human and machine cognition. Excited to be involved as an Associate Editor!
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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Now out in an issue! Children find it easier to represent uncertainty about *what* an object is than *where* an object is, with interesting implications for both early possibility reasoning and object representations ~~ Check it out 👉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
direct.mit.edu
Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”
Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general li...
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Carolyn Bertozzi @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social · 30/07/2026
We already do this and companies who want them are happy to pay for PhD student interns. Why do precious and limited NSF funds need to be deployed for this? Most PhD student pursue industry jobs anyways - that has always been true. Use NSF funds to support basic science that industry wont support!
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velveetasneeze.bsky.social @velveetasneeze.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
In his role as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought is the central architect driving the destruction of your government. He created lawlessness in every part of the Trump administration. Russell Vought isn’t just engaging in politics; he is dismantling our government.
impeachvought.com
Impeach Vought
We are current and former federal workers from across the government. We have witnessed first-hand the harm Russell Vought has inflicted on American communities. We are urging Congress to act now to p...
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
People who read about these ideas and who actually support these proposals grievously misunderstand how scientific discovery actually works, and they misunderstand the differences between basic and applied research as well. I am not going to try to teach them any of those things today, because that's not the issue here. That's because the people making these proposals do not give the proverbial rat's ass about any of that stuff. They cannot be forced to understand the parts that they are wrong about nor to care that they are wrong in the first place. Imagining that these explaining-and-convincing tasks are possible and that these would make the administration change course is mere daydreaming. These people want money and they want power and they want revenge, and no amount of evidence or reasoned argument is going to slow them down. Save your breath.
Instead, it's time for politics. Those public comments (as with OMB) have legal processes that have to be used to deal with them, and if the administration tries to shortcut them, then you sue. You bring suits
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Once you understand that this is a model of science written by non-scientists who hate universities but love venture capital and redirecting money to political allies, everything makes a lot more sense. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/u...
nytimes.com
Trump’s Plan for Science: More Money for A.I., Less for Universities
Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science adviser, proposed overhauling how the government funds research. Democrats said Mr. Trump’s actions had weakened science.
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Danny Kingsley @dannykay68.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
EXCELLENT: The Netherlands new OA policy seems to be well thought through obc.copim.pub/when-scaling... Policy explicitly recommends redirection & reallocation of funds from existing ‘big deal’ budgets towards community-driven alternatives, incl university-led diamond OA & Netherlands Uni Presses
obc.copim.pub
When 'scaling small' becomes national policy
The Netherlands' new open access strategy echoes the principles the Open Book Collective was built on - 'scaling small' and community-led publishing
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Kestrel Casey @kestrelcasey.com · 17/07/2026
Time to bring this one back around.
Did the name Odysseus exist before the Odyssey, or was Homer like "this is my new book "the journey" and our hero... Journathan"
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Raphaël Millière @raphaelmilliere.com · 11/06/2026
Now published in open access! Your one-stop shop for the philosophy of language models. It's the spiritual descendant of our two-part preprint from 2024, fully updated. This should be particularly useful for anyone looking for an entry point into this rapidly growing field.
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The Philosophy of Language Models
The success of large language models (LLMs) across many domains of AI research has generated intense debate. Some attribute their impressive performance on complex tasks to human-like linguistic and ...
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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1
osf.io
OSF
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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
H1B visas were historically key for postdocs and research scientists (and future PIs and professors) - and the fee threatened to totally derail that pipeline. This is good news.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 08/06/2026
Metaphor alert.
nytimes.com
Huge American Flag Flies Into Power Lines, Knocking Out Power for Thousands
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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵
osf.io
OSF
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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:
science.org
The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
There's a persistent fantasy that maybe some other nice countries will start mass-hiring US scientists. That's not going to happen. A few high-profile, big name researchers will get poached, sure. But most countries, including some very nice ones, are underemploying their own scientists already.
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Chenxin Li, PhD @chenxinli2.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Dear colleagues, PLEASE submit a comment against OMB's proposed rule. Elizabeth wrote great guide on drafting a comment. To submit it, go to www.regulations.gov/search and search for OMB-2026-0034. It will take time & effort to write a good comment, but a worthwhile effort to save our profession.
regulations.gov
Regulations.gov
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Ebru Evcen @ebruevcen.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Worth highlighting this part. If it goes through, I’m not sure conferences survive. Currently scheduled ones may see people withdrawing at rates that require cancellation. I don’t know anyone with an active grant who budgeted for specific conferences, and many don’t have alternative funds.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/05/2026
Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.
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Urvi Maheshwari ツ @urvi.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6
osf.io
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Excited to have been wrong about this! A few years ago, Tal told me he was working on intuitions about complexity. I knee-jerkily said, “but surely that’s not a natural kind! Why think that people have intuitions about complexity across domains?” Good thing this is the last time I’ll ever be wrong!
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Urvi Maheshwari ツ @urvi.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
The work: experimental studies of language and conceptual development with kids 2-7. 1-yr position with possible renewal, starts Aug/Sep 2026. Please share with interested students! Lab: childlanguage.yale.edu
childlanguage.yale.edu
Child Language Development Lab | Child Language Development Lab
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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Hiring! Athulya Aravind and I are looking for a full-time Postgraduate Associate at Yale (Linguistics/Psychology). The position is designed as preparation for PhD applications in linguistics, cog sci, or psychology, including structured mentoring and research training. tinyurl.com/mrxjya5t
tinyurl.com
Postgraduate Researcher in Language and Conceptual Development — Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology, Yale University (joint appointment); affiliated with the Program in Cognitive S...
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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
If you've ever sought NSF funding for anything behavioral sciences related, do this now: cossa.org/action-cente...
cossa.org
Action Center | COSSA
A consortium of Social Science Associations works to communicate the importance of social & behavioral science research to policymakers. The powerful stories come from people who express how it is lik...
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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
NSF wouldn’t have to do this if only we had institutions where the best researchers from different disciplines were all in a complex of buildings so it would be easy to work together, and also they did that while training the next generation of researchers, and also they liked Trump more
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Ryan Lei @ryanlei.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
American science deserves better... not just from the federal government but from the leaders of the organization that ostensibly represents the best of the best in science, engineering and medicine. But, that reputation depends not just on past achievements but what they do in the moment.
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Announcement for @nationalacademies.org "State of the Science" address on 6/2 declares: "Since McNutt delivered her 2025 address, federal funding for science has held steady, but significant cuts are still being considered." Really? On what planet is funding steady & cuts being *considered*? a 🧵
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
The grant is "clean" means it no longer contains "terms potentially associated with misalignment with agency priorities" picked up by the "computational text analysis tool." Grants cannot be funded without checking this box. Yet NIH leaders like Bhattacharya & Letai insist NIH has no banned words.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
I resigned from the National Science Board in May when meaningful oversight became untenable. I respect colleagues who stayed to serve the NSB's mission. Today's news clarifies that was an erosion of oversight and function has become open elimination of the Board itself. 🧵 time.com/7285045/resi...
time.com
Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress
I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Once the expert advisory boards are gone, next step: replace with political ideologues and/or patronage system. Example from NIH via @mmolteni.bsky.social: Blanche may not have prior publications/NIH funding but is Founder/CEO of "Integrative Healing Center & Spa, a holistic medicine practice."
statnews.com
Doctor, wife of acting U.S. attorney general, appointed to NIH advisory council
An integrative medicine doctor who is the wife of the acting U.S. attorney general has been named as a member to one of the advisory councils that provides critical funding recommendations to the NIH.
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Noam Ross @noamross.net · 26/04/2026
Again, the White House has decided to prioritize the destruction of public science, ignoring both what the public want and what the laws that Congress has passed demand.
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Ryan Comes @rbcomes.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Congress has to stop assuming that it's business as usual! Write it in the law! I'm at a loss for why @vanhollen.senate.gov and company would assume that OMB isn't going to use every lever at their disposal to break the government.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
We asked Congress about this. Here's the statement we got from @vanhollen.senate.gov's office.
“We made clear that funding cuts of more than 5 percent for any of its directorates would be out of bounds,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, said in a statement. “We expect NSF to implement the law as Congress directed and will be monitoring to ensure that they do.” (The Republican chair of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, did not respond to a request for comment.)
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