We welcome abstracts from students (or from collaborations with students as first authors) for poster presentation in line with the theme of the Abstract // Specific Workshop, summarized below:
It has long been evident that speakers simultaneously possess abstract knowledge of language that they use to generalize and adapt flexibly to new scenarios, but also retain item-specific knowledge that is derived from their experience with language usage, allowing them to efficiently anticipate familiar situations. However, the relationship between these two types of knowledge, and the extent to which each is recruited in any specific instance of language use, remains a subject of intense debate.
Recent advances in experimental methods and the sharpening of theoretical tools via computationally-implemented models have led to a recent flowering of advances in this area, with theories and models of this trade-off being developed largely independently and in parallel across domains including phonology, lexical semantics, syntax, and psycholinguistics. Further, work across these domains is carried out using a range of methodologies that are rarely brought into conversation with one another, and which offer different, complementary perspectives and types of evidence: experimental linguistics (ex., wug-tests, acceptability judgment tasks), evidence from language acquisition (both L1 and artificial language learning), morphological processing, corpus data, and computational modeling (both simulations studies and theory-driven statistical modeling of empirical data). This workshop is an interdisciplinary meeting to bring these data and methods from across domains to advance towards a theoretically coherent, and broadly empirically supported understanding of the tradeoff between abstraction and item-specific knowledge.
Format
Please upload a one-page anonymous abstract in 12-pt Times New Roman or Arial font, with one-inch margins, in .pdf format. A second page may be used for figures, tables, examples, or other references if needed.
Deadline for submissions is July 7th, 2025, 11:59pm PST.
The abstract submission deadline has passed, and presenters have been notified.