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Tom Williamson

@trwilliamson.bsky.social

78 followers 69 following 18 posts

brain linguist | working on: neurostimulation, language, gesture, embodied cognition, intraoperative language testing | UWE Bristol/Southmead Hospital & USC | former: Oxford, Cambridge, Lancaster

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Sep 10

6. Developed a typology of interactive gestures: two types (acknowledging and transferring) and many subtypes
7. Found evidence that gesture handshape kinematics have organisational properties over gesture phrases akin to natural language syntax (e.g. non-adjacent dependency)

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Sep 10

2. Made world's largest (semi-)naturalistic gesture corpus
3. Interactive gestures sig. fall when you can't see interlocutor torso
4. Specific gestures sig. co-occur with specific errors (e.g. metaphoric with anomia)
5. Gesturer profiles-EFA suggests ppl use representational or conversational types

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Sep 10

Over the recent months, I've had lots of fun presenting main findings from my PhD's first phase! I thought I'd share some highlights :)

1. Evidence of separate reps in the brain of British Sign Language and English in an awake craniotomy patient, confirming reviews of unimodal bilingual patients

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Jul 8

Here in beautifully leafy (and compared to the UK, wonderfully town-planned) Nijmegen for the @isgs2025.bsky.social conference! Find myself particularly taken by the suburban architecture for reasons I cannot yet explain.

Excited for the event and to meet other researchers for the first time!

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Jul 8

Delighted to see our paper in @cogscisociety.bsky.social!

We look at how individuals from different backgrounds/LLMs approach the interpretation of colour metaphors they know or ones we made up ('novel').

Blog: cognitivesciencesociety.org/color-metaph...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Statistical or Embodied? Comparing Colorseeing, Colorblind, Painters, and Large Language Models in Their Processing of Color Metaphors

Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience—such as color perception—be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand a...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Mar 25

Immediately purchased. Love it!

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Mar 18

You're so bloody smart

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Feb 28

Excited to announce my special session @lagbling.bsky.social 2025 conference!

Title: Gesture and the Linguistic System.
Deadline: 14th April 2025

Papers should treat gesture with (formal) linguistic analysis to elucidate its systemic properties as a part of language

www.lagb.org.uk/lagb2025

LAGB 2025 - University of Suffolk

www.lagb.org.uk

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Reposted by Tom Williamson

LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee @lagbpsc.bsky.social · Jan 16

📣Applications open for two new members!

Our chair @GianlucaPorta5 and secretary @NevenaKlobucar will be soon leaving the committee 👋 and two new positions will be available!

If you are interested in joining us, apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Application for Membership to the LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee (LAGBPSC)

The Linguistics Association of Great Britain Postgraduate Student Committee (LAGBPSC) is looking for UK-based postgraduate students to join the Committee. Priority will be given to applicants in their...

docs.google.com

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Dec 19

For sure! Perhaps I can share the data to help train the model when I'm done!

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Dec 19

This is super clever and exciting work, really impressive! Though, also very timely as I've nearly finished manually coding ~50 participants' gestures from 30-minute naturalistic conversations in ELAN...!!

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Dec 2

So I'm continually impressed with my research assistant, they did an incredible job. Really affirms to me the importance of listing your research assistants as co-authors - in these contexts, I can't argue strongly enough for it.

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Dec 2

Being a confederate in a psychology/conversation experiment is *really* hard. Conversing with people pretending you're naive to the experiment, acting as if everything's new each time, keeping the paradigm running smoothly, not getting drawn into debating people's terrible takes! I could never!!

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Nov 27

Imaginably tough especially because clinic can bring a lot one might want to write about! Our lab recently had a cool case, though that did require significant overtime prep & writing effort: doi.org/10.1007/s007...

Awake craniotomy with English and British sign language mapping in a patient with a left temporal glioblastoma reveals discordant speech-sign language maps - Acta Neurochirurgica

The aim of this case study was to describe differences in English and British Sign Language (BSL) communication caused by a left temporal tumour resulting in discordant presentation of symptoms, intra...

doi.org

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Nov 27

Going from a purely academic to an academic-clinical position has posed personal challenges I never expected. Being confronted with a preference for pragmatism is very humbling for the conscientious perfectionism that academia culturally curates. Although perhaps this is just UG -> PhD anyway

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Nov 25

A lot of us bought the course textbook in my undergrad, which was very much a collection of authored chapters like a handbook, though I think that was because it was written by everyone at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social! Smart marketing!!

Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Nov 25

Our group at USC had similar recently, though we did choose to accept. What's on my mind is how valuable the unrecorded impact on students (who just read and don't cite) is. I suppose authors' decisions to contribute vary by whether it's a gap in the literature or students that's fuelling demand

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Nov 24

Super excited to hear you working on this! I'm actually mid-way coding the results of a gesture experiment that I guess could be a corpus too... I'm nearly 80% done and so far have ~5,500 gesture tokens. Happy accident of recruiting more participants than I realised I needed :)

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Tom Williamson @trwilliamson.bsky.social · Nov 24

Really excited to be heading to Barcelona for the 7th Mapping/Neuropsychological Assistance Workshop 2024 at the University Hospital of Bellvitge this week, then on to Cardiff for the Brain Box NIBS workshop!

Super busy but can't think of a better way to learn these vital skills hands on!!

Reposted by Tom Williamson

LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee @lagbpsc.bsky.social · Nov 20

It was a pleasure to host Anna Marie Trester from the Linguistic Society of America for the first session of our Career Talks!

You can find the recording on YouTube 🍿
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVcp...

📌Next talk is on the 12th of December!

Fundamentals of Getting a Job as a Linguist - Careers Talk Series

YouTube video by LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee

www.youtube.com

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