Matt Goldrick
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mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Matt Goldrick
@mattgoldrick.bsky.social
1.4K followers 920 following 370 posts
Linguistics and cognitive science at Northwestern. Opinions are my own. he/him/his
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mattgoldrick.bsky.social
The WSJ tech reported did a test and immediately got a lexical confusion (smoothie -> movie)
Text chain showing output from AirPods Pro 3 "live translation" from French to English and back. Je vois qu'il est en train de jeter I see he's throwing son smoothie partout His smoothie everywhere Yes, he is throwing his movie. Oui, il lance son film.
September 17, 2025 at 3:32 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Super happy with Cogsci program assistant Chris Kent's work for our college Instagram feed. Glad I could get our Loki featured to advertise my class.
Title: The Cats of Cogsci. Two cats, Coco and Loki, with Northwestern Cognitive Science logo in the background. Coco is sitting on some books and Loki is holding an apple. Both are wearing glasses b/c they are academics. Loki the cat has his paw on a laptop; text "Remember to add Cog Sci 110 to you shopping cart now in Caesar so that you're ready to enroll come September 12th!"
September 6, 2025 at 8:15 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Wuggish (wug-like?) stickers have been popping up in my neighborhood
USPS sticker on a telephone pole. It has a drawing in green marker of a little creature in profile with a sharp pointed nose, two small legs and one eye. The creature's skin is covered in swirly lines. Behind the creature are two small five pointed stars orbiting one another.
August 12, 2025 at 3:14 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Our novel method allows us to precisely quantify the similarity of L2 to L1 talkers, capturing substantial amounts of variability in this relationship. It substantially improves over existing global acoustic measures! 6/
A scatterplot showing mean proportion correct identification of words in L2 English speech (y axis) by distance of L2 English speech from L1 English speech (x axis). A regression line shows a significant relationship, such that L2 speakers who farther away from L1 English productions are harder to understand.
February 28, 2025 at 6:33 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
30 years of representing CogSci (outside my aunt's house in Delaware, 1995)
A younger man with bleached-blonde hair, wearing a blue t-shirt that says "I <heart symbol> CogSci"
February 27, 2025 at 5:30 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Nonwords in the New Yorker! Don't make adjustments, people. www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28987
A cartoon entitled "Live & Learn". First panel caption "When I was little, my mother called dust motes 'FLERBS." (A girl with a bow in her hair and thick-rimmed glasses looks at dust motes and says "What are those specks?" and an older woman with similar glasses, an eyebrow raised, says "Those are FLERBS.") Next panel caption "I didn't realize there was no such until I was twenty." (The girl, now a young woman, near dust motes says "So many *flerbs*!" and a young rumpled hair man says "Huh?"). Third panel "If you don't want to be a weirdo, you make adjustments." (Young man says "They're *DUST MOTES*!" and chastened young woman says "O.K."). Last panel "But secretely:" (The woman, now older, sits in her chair, thinking silently "Flerbs.")
January 10, 2025 at 9:12 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Using a holistic comparison of utterances -- without requiring any alignment of speech to discrete linguistic units -- we substantially improve our ability to account for variation in intelligibility for sentence-sized stimuli
Graph showing relative improvement in likelihood for a number of predictors. Distance in perceptual similarity space (our new measure) accounts for over 50%; number of pauses account for just over 30%; a set of other acoustic cues make negligible contributions to improvement in likelihood.
June 21, 2024 at 2:52 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Feb 21: What authors need to know about peer review
January 23, 2024 at 9:47 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Feb 14: What a reviewer needs to know about peer review
January 23, 2024 at 9:47 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Feb 8: An intro to peer review
January 23, 2024 at 9:46 PM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Flash forward 15 years
January 12, 2024 at 4:14 AM
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Curious about how these 17th-century mugs are linked to the 18th-century Toby Jug www.tobyjugmuseum.com/toby-jugs any ideas @benzimmer.bsky.social?
Drunken Parson toby jug made by Enoch Wood circa 1790. The Drunken Parson is looking to his right in a stupor with a leering expression and his tricorn hat askew on his head. He is attempting to pour wine from the jug in his right hand into the wine glass in his left. https://www.tobyjugmuseum.com/recipes/drunken-parson-toby-jug---enoch-wood-circa-1790
August 24, 2023 at 6:32 PM