iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

New paper! At ICPhS in 2023 Gemma invited me onto a project looking at duration as an acoustic correlate of the tap-trill contrast in Spanish heritage speakers from California. We look at children and adults, comparing them to age-matched monolinguals. Some fun Bayesian modelling as a bonus!

cambridge.org

Duration as an acoustic cue of the Spanish tap-trill contrast according to age and language background | Journal of the International Phonetic Association | Cambridge Core

Duration as an acoustic cue of the Spanish tap-trill contrast according to age and language background

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Eduroam always sucks (posted using mobile hotspot from my university campus)

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

What's that? After waiting for a good bit on proofs for two articles they both show up on the same day right before a holiday weekend?

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Brian Wong @brianwwl.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

📢 New paper in JEP:HPP Speech perception gradiency (sensitivity to fine-grained phonetic detail) has been shown to enhance speech perception flexibility (recovery from misleading information) in L1 English. But does it play the same role in L2? doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... @bcbl.bsky.social

doi.org

APA PsycNet

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Invited talk to a doctoral seminar tomorrow, and we're taking time to talk about the estimand. I feel like senior researchers generally have an implicit understanding of this concept, but I've found it helps people a lot to talk about it explicitly at the beginning of statistical training.

A picture of a slide titled "The estimand" with the subtitle (The most important word you'll never hear).

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

In data cleaning this week, I learned that ePrime often defaults to entering a value of '0' when there is no response. This is pretty bonkers, and it's crazy that a dedicated experimental software that you pay a lot of money for does this. Needless to say I have to re-write some scripts...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

My son tried a bagel for first time recently. My wife taught him to correct my pronunciation. Now, when I say "do you want a [bægəl]?", his response is "No, [beɪgəl]!".

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Me when my Bayesian SEM model samples properly and quickly the first time around:

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 16/08/2024

🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) Below a thread summary 🧵1/n #metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Happy US book release day to me, my amazing co-author @alexhanna.bsky.social and everyone else who can now open up their own copy!! All the details on ordering, events, and news coverage at thecon.ai

thecon.ai

THE AI CON

How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

I've recently spent lots of time on the Discourse pages of different academic softwares, and it made me appreciate the Stan site so much. I found horrendous amounts of condescension and general unhelpfulness out there, which is not something I see much of over at discourse.mc-stan.org

discourse.mc-stan.org

The Stan Forums

A community to discuss Stan and Bayesian modeling.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

No, YOU just wasted an hour checking whether or not the list randomization in your experiment was working before realizing you'd copy and pasted the same file into all parts of the ifelse statement...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

The past 4 weeks I've taught a regression crash course to graduate students in linguistics. This is my fifth year teaching the course, and I decided to switch to teaching model interpretation using the marginaleffects package. Here are my thoughts along with info from an anonymous student survey 🧵

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

I have taught a statistics and R crash course to graduate students in linguistics for four years. We cover an intro to R and then lm(er) and glm(er). This year, I'm overhauling the course and teaching everyone to use marginaleffects from @vincentab.bsky.social for model interpretation.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Does anyone know of a textbook aimed at undergraduate linguistics students that covers the conceptual basics of automatic speech recognition without getting into the mathematical details? Trying to not scare my students next term who won't have a math background at all...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Having one of those days where I'm upset with past me for not organizing things better in the earlier stages of my doctoral research. Going through this is so much harder than it needs to be.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

This is great! I do the same thing manually when I teach students how to interpret these plots, because seeing a bunch of examples where you know the assumption actually holds is the only way I could think of to give them some intuition of when things are going wrong.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Hey, Bayesian modelling people, I need your help! I'm trying to learn how to model continuous variables (e.g., reaction times) by a latent variable, with the latent variable being measured with ordinal survey data. Looking for learning resources and papers that have done this in the past!

discourse.mc-stan.org

Latent variable modelling when observed variables are ordinal

Wondering how people are doing latent variable modelling when the observed variables are ordinal. In the blog I link below this paragraph, an example in brms is given, but the observed variables relat...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

1. Figure out what I wanted to do with my life (other than play guitar and video games all day) 2. Business management & marketing 3. Hispanic linguistics 4. Postdoctoral researcher investigating phonetic variability & bilingualism

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

In a win this week, I gave an invited talk on quantitative methods to a doctoral seminar (first-year students only). No one had heard of stepwise regression, and so their first time hearing about it was me telling them not to use it (with illustrative examples and references).

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Okay, so I need your help to settle something. My wife and I each wrapped one shampoo/conditioner bottle as a competition, and we need you to break the tie (we each voted for our own). Vote with likes, photos in the thread.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Inspired by true events this morning, huge pet peeve of mine.

Anakin and padme meme

Anakin: The processing scripts and the data are available on OSF
Padme: You uploaded the raw data so I can run the script, right?
[Anakin just stares]
Padme: Right?

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Just submitted my first tenure-track job application!

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Many of you know I like discussing how we do research, and how we could approach the task of doing it better. I like to read on meta-research to try and track the discourse and see how I might improve my own projects. Many papers have good suggestions, and others are food for throught, however...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Four hours straight of class plus a two-hour commute. Then you see your neighbourhood pub has a beer from your favourite brewery.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I'll be presenting tomorrow at the virtual ASA meeting. If you're attending, I hope to see you at the "Student led tutorials" session where I will be giving an introduction to analyzing acoustic data with Bayesian mixture models.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

When reviewing, how do you convince authors to include details from models? I'm talking model estimates for fixed/random effects, contrast coding, exact numbers of observations / levels of grouping variables, etc. It's 2024, reporting significance alone just can't be enough!

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

So I deactivated my X account. I was bummed for a few days, until I realized that @dieworkwear.bsky.social is here as well! Now my feed full of linguistics and stats posts can be complemented by threads full of sartorial education and bashing right-wing assholes. All is as it should be.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

Here in Catalunya we don't have Halloween as a blocker, so Christmas chocolate is already on display in the grocery store:

A display of chocolate meant to consumption at Christmas on display in a grocery store on October the fourth.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 19/09/2024

Results are now public just as I get my office set up, so now I can share officially that I am now a SSHRC postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra working with @mllompart.bsky.social! Looking forward to two years of investigating phonetic variability in Catalan!

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 19/09/2024

Was wondering how everyone was seeing these for the past week because I only ever browse on my phone.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 14/07/2024

Linguists, generally: The vowel in the English word "shoe" is a back vowel. Me, looking at a "/u/" produced by a male speaker of NA English where the F2 is around 1800Hz:

media.tenor.com

You Sure About That I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson GIF

ALT: You Sure About That I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson GIF

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Reposted by Scott James Perry

Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 30/04/2024

I'm hiring a one-year postdoc in sociolinguistics/phonetics for next year (at Berkeley, with me)! Please share with your networks and students! linguistlist.org/issues/35-13...

linguistlist.org

LINGUIST List 35.1351 Jobs: Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California - Berkeley

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 28/03/2024

When reviewing a paper, how much do you push back on field-wide issues? On one hand, this feels unfair to me, as it is an 'us' problem, not a 'this paper specifically' problem. On the other hand, we can't let papers perpetuate problematic practices, right?

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Matt Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

Three (3!) teaching postdoc positions in Cognitive Science at Rutgers (open until filled) jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/221...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 12/03/2024

I am modelling a count variable with a floor of 1. A Poisson model thinks that there should be a certain number of zero counts, even though that is impossible. What would be the solution here? Subtract 1 from all counts? Something else?

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

Celebrating a complete rough draft of the thesis with one of my all-time favourites.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 17/01/2024

The second article from my dissertation is now out as my first, first-authored paper! This was a joint work with @mckphon.bsky.social and my supervisor Benjamin V. Tucker. We did a corpus analysis of The Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish, and this is what we found (thread) doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

After a nice Christmas break, I now have approximately one month to get a copy of my dissertation to my committee. Do you know what that means? For me, it means lots of pomodoros and two cups of delicious coffee a day!

Coffee containers from Rogue Wave, Nomad, and Luminous coffee.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 20/12/2023

Stats consulting is constantly like: Them: I want you to run (complex stats) Me: OK, what's your research question though? Them: ...A (complex stat)? Me: Research question? Them: You know, like the stats in this journal article. Something reviewers will like.

Goose chasing meme.

"What's your research question?"

Then angry goose chasing yelling the same phrase.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 18/12/2023

Just had my first, first-authored paper accepted for publication in JASA! Stay tuned if you like studies of spontaneous speech, phonetic reduction, and Bayesian modelling...

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 06/12/2023

I'm going insane trying to convert an R Markdown document to a .tex file so I can knit it into my thesis (appendix). Shaded code blocks are interpreted as \end{document} and it's referencing like five .sty files I can't find anywhere. Has anyone written a useful guide on this?

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 22/11/2023

Realized today that running droplevels() on a dataframe in R resets all contrasts to dummy-coding if they have been changed. I don't understand why this behaviour would be desirable at all...

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Charles B. Chang @cbchang.bsky.social · 08/11/2023

Deadline for BU's search in child language acquisition coming up on Nov 10 (this Fri)! I'm on the search committee, happy to answer questions. Please consider applying and/or reposting 🙏 linguistlist.org/issues/34.27... #linguistics @bostonu.bsky.social @bucas.bsky.social

linguistlist.org

LINGUIST List 34.2714 Jobs: Language Acquisition: Assistant Professor of Linguistics (specializing ...

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 06/11/2023

Writing a response letter to reviewers for the first time for my own paper, and trying to find the right balance of using exclamation marks... I think too few make me come off like a jerk, but too many and the whole thing just reads as unhinged.

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 02/11/2023

I like to think that including memes in my teaching slides helps me drive home the main takeaways and make it memorable for students but to be honest? I'm pretty sure it's mostly for my own amusement.

Obiwan telling you to learn about regression

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 02/10/2023

Working in Praat today, which means breaking out the gaming pad. A lot of Praat keyboard shortcuts aren't the most comfortable (e.g., zoom to selection), and this lets me program macros to make things easier. I can move to zero crossings, create boundaries, and paste from clipboard in a single click

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Scott James Perry @sjperry.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

Check this out, someone used Bayesian modelling to determine what item dispensers to use in TOTK to get which items: cmshymansky.com/ZonaiDeviceA...

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