37.1732, Confs: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language 2026 (India)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1732. Tue May 12 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1732, Confs: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition  and Processing of Language 2026 (India)

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Date: 09-May-2026
From: Pallab Basu [huz248362 at iitd.ac.in]
Subject: South Asian Forum on the Acquisition  and Processing of Language 2026


South Asian Forum on the Acquisition  and Processing of Language 2026
Short Title: SAFAL 2026

Date: 10-Dec-2026 - 11-Dec-2026
Location: Hyderabad, India
Contact: Pallab Basu
Contact Email: huz248362 at iitd.ac.in
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/view/safal-2026/

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics;
Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

The study of cross-linguistic variability between languages has been a
central question in linguistic theory and has delivered important
insights into 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 grammar 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 and
that there are 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.



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