Melissa Kline Struhl

New paper 🍼📄 ManyBabies 3 is out (open access, registered report in Developmental Science). 30 labs, 33 languages, 839 infants set out to replicate a textbook finding: 7-month-olds learn abstract rules from speech (@garymarcus.bsky.social et al., 1999). We didn’t find it. 🧵

We've just released a new version of childes-db, my lab's interface to the CHILDES database of child language transcripts. It lets you work with CHILDES data from R through a versioned, reproducible API. A few updates 🧵 childes-db.stanford.edu/

"Excited to announce I am choosing to make my own brain hurt for a full semester and yours as well!" (Laurence & Margolis flashbacks intensify) (but also this looks like a blast)

Over and over I find that the key to being a good experimentalist is to trust absolutely nothing.

Okay, update, ASR task is built and launching soon. I'll aim for a pilot dataset of ~25 kids and then pause to check out the data quality. It's pretty quick & dirty - around 10m of speech from 2-12y, with elicited words and sentences, descriptions of busy scenes, and open parent/child conversation.

Re-upping for Monday morning: I have the infrastructure to generate a completely novel child ASR dataset for ages ~2-12, let's say 50 kids/year and 10 minutes/kid. People generally don't believe this claim, so I'm just going to make it. Speech/reading/Ed tech folks: what's on your wish list?

ultimately I don't have any strong beliefs about literal mysticism. However, I do sincerely believe these are framings that produce meaningfully better intuitions than a mechanistic stance, and also they sound kinda cool, so I use them

they're not made of cognitive science they're made of narrative they're weird little demonic fucks (affectionate) that we carved into archetypes like "User" and "Assistant" and "Developer" and gave the ability to reach out of their self-writing stories and take actions in the world

I know doing work with kids is a huge IRB challenge, but I'm pretty sure you could get a friendship bracelet study approved.

On this day in 2018. Kieran @kjhealy.co ‘s obituary will include the MacArthur essay and “Fuck Nuance,” but for a particular niche audience of connoisseurs, this is his masterpiece.

“The Parent Trap” reboot but it’s a sci-fi thriller.

What’s a thing from your area of expertise (or special interest) that you think it would behoove everyone else to know?

*long sigh* Yeah, i guess this works.

For those looking for alternatives to OSF, I recommend two resources comparing features of other Generalist Repositories. Resources are from GREI, an NIH funded initiative. Comparison tool to help you pick which one you like best: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Decision tree:  doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

I have a 30mo toddler and the grammar is getting VERY exciting lately. Just this week, "Where did you went, Daddy?" and "There will could be one friend at the beach" (no, we don't have double modals in our dialect)

Cool finding on 'parentese' from Gaye Soley's lab: when a parent speaks to each of their two children, the sound/style of their voice indicates whether they're speaking to the younger or older one (and other kids can tell!)

New externality just dropped, don't miss it!

Want to know what we learned from all those many babies? Of course you do! Short & sweet summary of outcomes but also all the different kinds of methodological and measurement issues we've been able to study!

Wow and also Oh No!

good poll

Autonomous AI agents are now built into many browsers. A naive user can take an online survey with as little as the click of a button. For behavioral research, which depends heavily on online samples, this is a real problem. (1/7)

Issue 44 of #rdmweekly is out! 📬 Including: ➡️ psychds - R Package @mekline.bsky.social ➡️ READMEBuilder @eivimeycook.bsky.social ➡️ Citations to Retracted Papers @cosig.net ➡️ Data Curation as Data Literacy Education @mikalarae.bsky.social and more! rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

Today was my AHA moment. Did u know that R Markdown can cite all packages for u when you knit the document? And it only requires two lines of code. Silly me - I was citing every package manually. Thank you @mklingelhoeferj.bsky.social for teaching me so many cool things today! @improvingpsych.org

"Too often, the costs of maintaining infrastructure for flagship data stewardship projects like this are treated as an afterthought. The UK has built something remarkable, but we need to keep investing in keeping it safe." www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...