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Department of Comparative Language Science

Call for Abstracts: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL) 2023

The Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning Workshop (X-PPL) brings together the growing community of researchers working to expand the diversity of languages in the scope of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research. This research is driven by the recognition that structural/typological and socio-cultural diversity provides important and unique opportunities to see language processing and language learning mechanisms at work.  The bulk of processing and acquisition research represents only a small fraction of linguistic diversity, and this risks biasing both our theories and our research questions.

The Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning Workshop (X-PPL) aims to fill this gap and provide a platform for cross-linguistic research on language processing and learning.  

X-PPL 2023 will be hosted by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution and the Department of Comparative Language Science at the University of Zurich, and will take place on November 06-08, 2023. 

Keynote speakers:

X-PPL 2023 will be held onsite in Zurich. However, it will be possible to accommodate a limited number of online talks (in a hybrid format). To make X-PPL 2023 accessible to researchers all over the world, we intend to stream all talks and discussions. There will also be two teaching sessions (see below).

We invite contributions for 20-minute talks on the interface of linguistic diversity and language processing (encompassing production and comprehension), and language learning with the goal of understanding linguistic ontogeny (first language acquisition) and phylogeny (typological diversification, structural evolution). We also invite abstracts on (a) methodological, cultural or other issues that research on language processing and learning outside of the lab might encounter or (b) plans for cross-linguistic work (see below). 

 

Specifically, we invite contributions presenting new evidence on:

  • Whether and how grammars are shaped by (cognitive and neurobiological) constraints on processing and learning, and by external pressures
  • Whether and how the different grammatical properties of linguistic systems shape processing and learning strategies

We welcome in particular:

  • Experimental and observational studies on under-researched languages providing implications for processing and acquisition theories
  • Studies examining production, comprehension, or (L1) developmental phenomena in one or more language(s) that were chosen for their grammatical characteristics
  • Studies providing processing-based or learning-based explanations of language change and typological distributions

In addition, there are a number of factors that make cross-linguistic and fieldwork-based research particularly difficult. Therefore, we also welcome abstracts which address:

  • Methodological issues which may be specific to cross-linguistic processing and acquisition research (such as small to non-existent corpora resources, varying literacy levels among speakers, participants who aren’t familiar with experiments/technology, etc.), and the solutions which researchers have found to address these issues
  • Methods for processing corpus and experimental data for psycholinguistic goals in low-resource languages

Furthermore, we invite abstracts on plans for experimental cross-linguistic work that the presenters would like to get feedback on, such as from researchers new to experimental cross-linguistic work that may particularly benefit from the expertise of the community.

Abstracts should be submitted as PDFs to https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/5927/submitter, no later than July 5, 2023. Abstracts should not exceed one A4 page (one additional page for interlinear-glossed examples, references, and figures is allowed). The organising committee will then select contributions for the talks at X-PPL 2023.

On November 8, two teaching sessions will be held, one on building language acquisition corpora and one on online experiments with PCIbex (by Florian Schwarz, University of Pennsylvania). The aim of these sessions is to provide the X-PPL community with skills that can be transferred to foster additional cross-linguistic research.