36.3467, Support: Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Mobility Grants for PhD students, Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, Université Paris Cité

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3467. Thu Nov 13 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3467, Support: Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Mobility Grants for PhD students, Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, Université Paris Cité

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Date: 12-Nov-2025
From: Christel Préterre [christel.preterre at u-paris.fr]
Subject: Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Mobility Grants for PhD students, Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, Université Paris Cité


Institution/Organization: Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL) -
Université Paris Cité

Level: PhD

Duties: Research

Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics; General Linguistics;
Language Acquisition; Phonetics; Sociolinguistics

Description:

Incoming mobility grants - EFL project
Empirical Foundations of Linguistics EFL, funded by Université Paris
Cité, is one of the largest consortiums in the language sciences
across the world, with over 180 members, providing an excellent
infrastructure for linguistics in the Paris region. It brings together
expertise on more than 150 languages, and diverse methods of inquiry,
thanks to its interdisciplinary perspective. Researchers in the
consortium share an approach to language which is grounded in
empirical data from corpora of varying sizes, from behavioral and
neuroscientific experiments, from qualitative methods like interviews
and surveys, combined with state of the art computational and
statistical approaches. EFL gathers 11 research teams from 4 partner
universities : université Paris Cité, université Sorbonne Nouvelle,
université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Inalco.
For this 1st call, the EFL Project offers mobility grants up to a
maximum of 4000 euros each for a period of 3 months to PhD students in
linguistics and related fields.
The mobility has to take place between June 2026 and July 2027.
1.      Grant description
Candidates must be PhD students from a university outside France,
working in different fields of linguistics, including but not limited
to empirical linguistics, typology, field linguistics, computational
linguistics, psycholinguistics.
During their fellowship, they will be hosted by one of the EFL
research units and will attend research seminars at one of the partner
universities. A certificate of attendance and validation of these
seminars will be provided at the end of the semester.
(PhDs that are co-supervised by one partner university in France
cannot do their mobility in this university).
2.      Applications
The application file should include the following documents :
 - CV and cover letter
 - An official document certifying their enrollment in a PhD programme
 - A statement of 4-5 pages explaining their PhD project and its
relevance to the research topics of the EFL project.
 - A letter of recommendation from their PhD supervisor
 - A letter of invitation from a member of the EFL project cosigned by
the director of the inviting laboratory in France.
 - An estimated budget
3.      Estimated budget
Expenses can include :
 - Travel between home and the place of the mobility in Paris
 - Food (maximum 900 euros for 3 months)
 - Accomodation
 - Insurance and visa
Please indicate whether you have the possibility to apply for
additional funds for this mobility.
4.      Deadline and selection process
Deadline for applications: January 28th, 2026 (11.59 pm – Paris time)
Applications should be sent to the project manager Christel Préterre
(christel.preterre at u-paris.fr), copy to the EFL coordinator, Ioana
Chitoran (ioana.chitoran at u-paris.fr).
Applications will be examined by the EFL Scientific Council and
decisions will be communicated in February 2026.
5.      Upon completion of the mobility
Students are asked to send:
- one photo of themselves during the mobility
- a short text or a short video describing the visit, the research
carried out, and benefits of the programme.
This material will be posted on the EFL website and social media.
EFL Workpackages:
1 - Growing up, growing older : Language processing across the
lifespan
Throughout the various stages of life, from infancy to old age,
individuals experience important changes in their language abilities.
We will study the complexities and mechanisms behind these changes
using an interdisciplinary approach combining linguistics,
psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, neuroscience, clinical
phonetics, at behavioral and neural levels. We will explore issues
related to language acquisition, early linguistic or non-linguistic
communication, language abilities in aging and behavior/brain
plasticity, including atypical language development and associated
pathologies in aging.
2 - Bilingualism, multilingualism, and contact languages
Most people speak and understand more than one language, making
monolingualism the exception rather than the rule. Growing up or
living in an environment where multiple languages are spoken has
consequences from cognitive processes of the individual starting at
prenatal stages to complex societal questions in multilingual
communities. We will study speakers of various pairs of languages,
including bimodal speakers of spoken and signed languages. Our
interdisciplinary approach will allow us to address:
 - the representation of two or more languages in the human brain
 - language mixing and blending in multilingual societies
 - contact-induced variation and its typological outputs in diachrony
3 - Language variation and change
Languages vary over time, across regions and across speakers.
Increased language contact in a globalized world yields both more
standardization and faster spreading innovations. We will study
language variation and change documenting phonetic, lexical,
syntactic, semantic variation across related and unrelated languages,
exploring the trigger factors (e.g., language structures, cognitive
processing factors, social factors, modalities, registers, genres).
4 - Language and AI
Computational linguistics and AI have been strongly influenced by
recent technological developments in deep learning and large language
models, such as chatGPT, GPT-4. In the context of this paradigm shift,
we will study the potential of these new models, in both speech and
textual modalities, to:
 - better understand and document properties of human languages
 - better understand the new language models, their limits, their
alternatives
 - study applications of LLMs, including applications for society
5 - Linguistic diversity as a testing ground for theories of language
Empirical research has revealed a nuanced view of what languages may
or may not share. Through innovative cooperation within the EFL
community, we will test theories of language within and beyond
linguistics on the largest possible set of languages in all
modalities, using computational, corpus, experimental methods. We will
focus on:
 - Limits of linguistic diversity: How different can languages be in
all of their dimensions?
 - Grammar and its limits: How does conventionalized linguistic
knowledge interact with other sources of knowledge in shaping
languages?
 - The word as a basic unit of linguistic analysis: How crucial is the
notion of word to understanding the structure of languages?
6 - Language in its social context
Social context will be systematically studied in the analysis of
language phenomena which, in turn, inform social phenomena. We will
analyze socially situated and socially meaningful language practices
using indexical language resources from a sociolinguistic perspective
(e.g., construction of gender, agentivity of individuals, power
relations), addressing important social issues (e.g.,
human-environment links in the age of the anthropocene, linguistic
diversity at the level of families, towns or states in connection to
migration, social justice, inclusion).

Application Deadline: 28-Jan-2026

Email Address for Applications: christel.preterre at u-paris.fr

Contact Information:
Christel Préterre



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