10/10
Congrats to Maya Inbar on the publication of her final PhD paper! If you are at Cambridge bsky.app/profile/mrcc... take a moment to welcome her as she starts another exciting journey as a postdoc in the Woolgar lab! www.woolgarlab.org

9/10
Sometimes timings coincide… If you happen to be attending SLE, I will be giving a talk about this study in the seriously timely & interesting “Taking time seriously” workshop (WS18), Thursday Aug 28th, 12:30 CET.

societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/

8/10
This work highlights a global temporal regularity in speech and its link to neural dynamics, suggesting that prosodic structure reflects shared cognitive constraints. Thank you for reading ‘till here, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

7/10
All this would not have been possible without DoReCo, a wonderful resource curating spoken language corpora on a world-wide sample of over 50 languages. We extend our thanks to the creators, language documenters and all recorded people.

doreco.huma-num.fr

6/10
We also examined a faster speech rhythm—the syllable rate—and found that variation in syllable timing explains relatively little about the timing of intonation units. This supports the hypothesis that speech operates at multiple, functionally distinct temporal scales.

5/10
Previously, we (w/ @anatperry.bsky.social and Shir Genzer) showed that neural tracking of these rhythms is closely time-locked to the boundaries of IUs. The present study provides compelling evidence that this rhythm is a global property of speech production.
www.jneurosci.org/content/43/4...

4/10
The rhythm we observed parallels well-established low-frequency neural activity patterns, particularly delta-band activity, which has been linked to attention, memory encoding, and goal-directed action.

3/10
Intonation units have been widely discussed in linguistics as central to discourse organization. They help listeners follow conversational flow, allocate attention, and anticipate turns. They may also offer salient cues for children acquiring language.

2/10
We found that speakers in the entire sample produce intonation units at a rate of about one every 1.6 seconds.
This slow rhythm is strikingly stable across languages, speakers, and ages, suggesting it reflects a shared cognitive constraint rather than language-specific structure.

The call closed a couple of months ago. But stay tuned for more opportunities in the future!

4/4 ...Sure, it’s about sampling—but just as much, it’s a gentle push for doing psychophysics with one eye on the brain’s big wiring diagram. We didn’t shout it, but it’s there. This approach, to us, is an exciting way forward in studying neural mechanisms w/ behaviour.

3/4 Like any mechanistic account, this framework still stands to gain from more evidence—across different measurement modalities and test cases. Happily, that’s underway in our group and in labs across the field.

2/4 The core idea is simple: wherever there’s competition among neuronal populations, you’ll find sampling. ‪@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social‬ provided the space to lay out and contextualize this notion, which we’ve explored tirelessly over a good part of the last decade.

📣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!