iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jitse S. Amelink @jsamelink.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Day 2 of #SNL2026 (@snlmtg.bsky.social) is about to kick off with a panel on a personal favorite: language evolution with @braininspired.bsky.social, @ybecker.bsky.social, Sonja Kots and Richard Hahnloser

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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

To make sense of speech, listeners must segment sound streams into pieces. Across languages, people do so based more on consonants than vowels. A new @science.org study investigates the phenomenon via EEG recording in humans & dogs, finding that dogs also show consonant bias in word segmentation.🗣️🐶🧪

science.org

Neural evidence that dogs segment the speech they hear with a humanlike consonant bias

Across many human languages, consonants carry more lexical information than vowels. During speech segmentation, humans, unlike nonhuman primates, rely more on consonant than vowel patterns, despite vo...

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Straight into the lion's den! doi.org/10.5964/biol... Fitch warned me about the MERGE hole. After showing the AF-MTG connection in chimps, I saw a need to tie this to the Faculty of Language and its MERGE core. If AF-MTG underpins FLN, its presence in chimps = continuous evolution from our LCA.

doi.org

The Arcuate Fascicle Middle Temporal Gyrus Connection in Chimpanzees: A Missing Link in Language Evolution?| Biolinguistics

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Chris Krupenye @chriskrupenye.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Job Alert 🚨 - please share! My brilliant friend and collaborator, Fumihiro Kano, is launching a new Ecological & Collective Cognition lab at Kyushu University, and has postdoc, grad, and tech openings! Lab video: youtu.be/rXT-yjQzJxU More details: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

youtu.be

groupdemo kyushu 04132026

YouTube video by 狩野文浩

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Reposted by Yannick Becker

Prof. Dr. Asli Ozyurek @asliozyurek.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

lnkd.in

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

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mhoeschele.bsky.social @mhoeschele.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Looking for a Postdoc position and have a background in bioacoustics and animal cognition? Interested in whether other animals might have something akin to language? Join our team: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/oeaw-home...

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Reposted by Yannick Becker

Limor Raviv 🐘🤗🦒🍄🦄 @limorraviv.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Super proud of this fabulous team for challenging old comparative frameworks and rethinking what makes language language. Read more in the thread below 👇 or here 📖😊: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

cell.com

The ‘design features’ of language revisited

Language is often regarded as a defining trait of our species, but what are its core properties? In 1960, Hockett published ‘The origin of speech’ enumerating 13 design features presumed to be common ...

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Reposted by Yannick Becker

Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

🚨JOB ALERT! 🚨 The Department of Anthropology, Hirszfeld Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy in Wrocław, Poland is looking for a Postdoc in the project "The human white sclera: the role of colouration and contrast in perceiving the eyes of others." Please Share!

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Marlen Fröhlich @marlenfroehlich.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

📢 2 PhD positions (E13 TV-L, 75%) in our DFG-funded project on great ape communication & the evolution of common ground! 🧠 Backgrounds in biology, psychology or linguistics welcome. 🗓️ Deadline: Aug 13 🔗 bit.ly/4l8p7hy & bit.ly/46jcfAq Please share! @elmanubohn.bsky.social @meanwhileina.bsky.social

bit.ly

PhD Researcher (m/f/d, E13 TV-L, 75%)

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

If you want to learn more, I'm presenting this study tomorrow Fri 16th of May ~10:30am at the Neuro-primatology symposium #neurofrance2025 @socneuro.bsky.social

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

9/n Huge kudos to the EBC Consortium behind this work—sourcing naturally or unavoidably deceased primates from the field all across Africa, from sanctuaries and from zoos all across Europe. The future of language research lies in both the lab and the wild. 🧪🌿

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

8/n Bonus: Chimp communication already shows structure, combinations, and even some syntax-like patterns. See super recent example: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... The long AF may support this, making it a bridge between gesture, vocalisation, and early language.

science.org

Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion

Chimpanzees uniquely use diverse combinatorial mechanisms to alter meaning in call combinations.

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

7/n Bottom line? The neural scaffolding for language likely existed in the last common ancestor of humans and chimps, ~7 million years ago.

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

6/n Lateralisation matters too. Most chimps (esp. zoo-housed) showed left-hemisphere dominance for AF-MTG, just like us. Wild chimps had more variation—hinting at environmental influence on brain plasticity. 🌍🧠

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

5/n Key finding: 🔹 In humans, AF-MTG is stronger than AF-STG 🔹 In chimps, it’s the opposite—AF-STG dominates → Suggests evolutionary strengthening of a pre-existing pathway, not a brand-new invention.

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

4/n The AF-MTG connection in chimps is weaker than in humans but present in all tested brains. And that changes everything. Language wiring didn’t appear out of nowhere—it evolved gradually. 🧬

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

3/n But in our new study, using ultra-high-res diffusion MRI (500μm), we found AF-MTG connections consistent in both wild and captive chimpanzees.

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

2/n The arcuate fascicle (AF) is a key brain tract linking language areas in humans, especially Broca’s area with the middle temporal gyrus (MTG), vital for syntax and semantics. Until now, AF-MTG connection was thought to be human-only. 🤯

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

🚨 Language connection FOUND in chimpanzees? 🧠🗣️ For years, scientists thought the key to human language was a fibre connection, missing in chimp brains. New high-res brain scans just changed the game. 👀🐒 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Neuroscience #LanguageEvolution #Chimpanzees 1/n 🧵👇

Portrait of the chimpanzee “Wazak” (©James Mollison) & Nerve fibres in the chimpanzee brain (©MPI CBS)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59254-8

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

It turns out that AF is indeed linked to communication (vocal AND gestural)!!! Great that parts of this project are finally seeing the light of day. thanks to Adrien Meguerditchian and @erc.europa.eu, @ilcb.bsky.social, @neuromarseille.bsky.social, @fondationfyssen.bsky.social for the support!

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Indeed for some reason I got hooked by the arcuate fascicle (or fasciculus). And Erin across the ocean knew about tractography in chimpanzees! At the same time, Bill Hopkins had behavioural data on the same chimpanzees! And Suhas was an incredible help!

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Hey Arcuate freaks and geeks! I first contacted Erin in 2019. I was working on my PhD in France on communication correlates of homologous language regions in primates. But what about their interconnections? The article: rdcu.be/eifzU

rdcu.be

Individual variation in the chimpanzee arcuate fasciculus predicts vocal and gestural communication

Nature Communications - Here, authors reveal the anatomy of the chimpanzee arcuate fasciculus predicts use of intentional, communicative gestures and sounds. The chimpanzee arcuate is not...

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Yannick Becker @ybecker.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Exciting! @evfedorenko.bsky.social and coll. @natureportfolio.bsky.social (NatRevNeurosci)'s piece functionally separated a core lang network from a percept.-motor network (+others); and asked for an evo perspective! Here we go: s.gwdg.de/WUPS8h (together with A.D. Friederici)

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