Your cat is obeying the prime directive: sit on a cat-ish sized surface on top of another surface. Extra points for rectangular surfaces, bags, and being half-on, half-off. Wyatt aims for a trifecta.

Definitely Language Game too!

Yes, kids must read outside of school. Educators know this, sometimes tell parents/caregivers, who sometimes have the resources/interest/time to promote home reading. Estimates of kids' reading (aka print/text exposure) predict reading skill big time. One example from the research lit: rdcu.be/eJTI3

A subject-verb agreement error, right in the headline! A little irony here is that some of us analyzed patterns of these errors to argue against strict "Words and Rules" approaches to language use that were favored by...Well, iykyk @drlearnasaurus.bsky.social @heidilorimor.bsky.social

Ah, the curse of interdisciplinarity. Also autocorrect.

Yes. There are other factors at play, but the (imperfect) Gleitman et al. (2007, JML) attention capture study showed that subliminally directing attention to agent/theme affected structure. A gen'l bias to 👀 left 1st should yield structure that allows the 1st fixated object to be 1st in utterance

fwiw, Kay Bock, when she gave me some pictures years ago, said it was important to counterbalance pic orientation because of L-R bias. Also in this study we found a Left bias in nonlinguistic action (touching locations on a touch screen), fyi. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

So sorry, Kirby. I'm sure she had a great life with you.

Thanks, Adam! Yes, I emphasize benefits of all forms of talking, but writing in particular often gives us the best return. Writing's reflection, comparative slowness, & effort all amplify learning and insight. As @biblioracle.bsky.social says, offloading writing to AI dulls the value for students.

I'm a recently retired cognitive psychologist, still active in thinking and writing. I'd be happy to talk, but maybe you're looking for Brits? I'm in the US

Same, but with yawning.

More anecdotes: I study talking, so ppl tell me about the talking they observe. Some teachers have said that kids used to file into class talking up a storm, but now many come in silent, looking at their phones. I would love to know research tracking amount and change in kids' talking over time.