Alexander Kilpatrick

Alexander Kilpatrick

Associate Professor at the University of Aizu and Director of the Language, Cognition, and Computation Laboratory. Research interests include computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, information theory, phonology, sound symbolism, and machine learning.

Blog posts

2026

In Defence of Small Effects: Why Any Signal in Language is Amazing

7 minute read

Published:

A few months ago, a paper of mine came back from peer review with a comment I have seen in various forms throughout my career. The reviewer acknowledged that the results were statistically significant, then added, almost as a dismissal: “but the effect sizes are small.” The implication was clear: if the variance explained is modest, the finding is modest. I want to push back on that, not defensively (well, perhaps a little defensively), but because I think this criticism, applied to research on the internal structure of language, fundamentally misunderstands what it would mean to find a large effect, and why finding any effect at all is pretty amazing.

The Lesson of Chelmsford

4 minute read

Published:

Before I knew him, my father was an addict. What follows is not a tragic backstory, nor a tale of overcoming difficulty to become a scientist. It is about what I learned later, as an adult, about the treatment he received, and about how that discovery has shaped how I think about science, evidence, and responsibility in my own research.