35.2240, Calls: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language

Wed Aug 14 00:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2240. Wed Aug 14 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2240, Calls: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language

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Date: 11-Aug-2024
From: Vaijayanthi Sarma [vaijayanthisarma at gmail.com]
Subject: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language

Full Title: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of
Language
Short Title: SAFAL

Date: 11-Dec-2024 - 12-Dec-2024
Location: IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India
Contact Person: Vaijayanthi Sarma
Meeting Email: safalaccs.iitb at gmail.com
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/safal-2024/home

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Language Acquisition;
Neurolinguistics; Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics
Language Family(ies): AA Group; Dravidian; Indo-Aryan; Mundari;
Tibeto-Burman

Call Deadline: 06-Sep-2024

Meeting Description:

The fifth edition of the South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and
Processing of Language (SAFAL) will continue to provide a platform for
the exchange of research on sentence processing, computational
modelling, corpus-based psycholinguistics, neurobiology of language,
and child language acquisition, among others, in the context of the
subcontinent's linguistic landscape.

This is an in-person conference which is being held jointly with the
Annual Conference of Cognitive Science (ACCS-11:
https://www.hss.iitb.ac.in/accs2024/) at IIT Bombay.

Call for Papers:

The study of cross-linguistic variability between languages has been a
central question in linguistic theory and has delivered important
insights on language. This focus on cross-linguistic variation is
essential for formulating and testing linguistic theories: A theory of
grammar should be a theory of all possible human grammars. Similarly,
a theory of the psychology of language should be based on
cross-linguistic evidence: Although grammars are language-specific,
speakers' minds and brains are species-specific and function according
to the same principles (Bock, Eberhard, Cutting, Meyer, & Schriefers,
2001).

However, a majority of psycholinguistic research focuses almost
exclusively on European languages: as of 2009, one could find
psycholinguistic studies on less than 1% of the world’s languages
(Jaeger & Norcliffe, 2009; Norcliffe, Harris, & Jaeger, 2015). This is
a problem, because much of our theory-building is based on a limited
group of languages, ignoring a treasure trove of syntactic,
morphological, and semantic variation that could hold the key to our
understanding of how the mind works. In particular, cross-linguistic
data may help answer questions such as: What are the processing
strategies and constraints that can be deemed universal, i.e. holding
across all languages? What is the cross-linguistic variability with
regard to processing strategies across languages? Equally, we can ask
about the growth of grammars in young children in mono-, bi- and
multilingual contexts and how such studies can inform us about the
universality of language acquisition as well as the specifics that
concern individual languages. In order to answer such questions, we
need to investigate languages from varied language families. Recent
work on the interaction of memory constraints and expectation in verb
final languages vs verb medial languages, for example, has revealed
that prediction processes in the former seem to be able to withstand
memory constraints better than the latter (e.g., Vasishth, Suckow,
Lewis, & Kern, 2010).  Work within language acquisition suggests that
lexical features such as animacy and gender in contrast to
phonologically driven rules are harder for children to acquire. There
are also effects of typology on both the speed of language acquisition
and the observed trajectories. Such typological variability and our
ability to make certain typological predictions in psycholinguistics
cannot be determined by studying languages of a single family or a
single geographical region.

SAFAL with its focus on the languages of India is an initiative that
seeks to address the needs as outlined above. India is uniquely placed
for such an enterprise with 22 languages in the 8th Schedule, over 450
recognised individual languages (Ethnologue) and many more languages
and dialects that have not received official recognition. These
languages cover seven language families, with multilingualism as the
norm rather than an exception among the speakers. Frequently,
individuals speak languages from different language families. This
linguistic diversity provides a rich context for the development and
testing of psycholinguistic theories.

Call for Abstracts:

We invite abstracts and presentations on:
 - phonetic/phonological/lexical/sentence/discourse processing
 - computational modelling
 - corpus-based psycholinguistics
 - neurobiological investigations of language
 - language acquisition in mono-/bi-/multilingual contexts
and all other areas of psycholinguistics in the context of the
subcontinent’s linguistic landscape.

Submissions are through CMT:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/User/Login?ReturnUrl=%2FSAFAL2024

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