Background and goal of the conference

There are many languages in East and Southeast Asia which are incredibly diverse and rich on both theoretical and empirical levels, including, among others, the Austronesian languages of Taiwan (see Li, Zeitoun & De Busser 2024) and the Philippines, the languages of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands (Heinrich, Miyara & Shimoji 2015). These languages, mostly under-studied in language processing research, provide unique insights for psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and language acquisition theories (see, for example, Collart 2024, Collart & Zeitoun 2024, Ono et al. 2020, Pizarro-Guevara & Garcia 2024, Sato et al. 2020, Tang 2021, Yano et al. 2019, Yokoyama & Kagomiya 2019).

In Taiwan, while the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics are well developed, there are very few studies examining other languages spoken on the island than Mandarin Chinese. One major reason that is usually brought up to reject the idea of conducting such experiments on Taiwanese, Hakka, Taiwan Sign Language or the Formosan languages is that there are too many challenges to properly conduct them. This is actually a general situation, as depicted in Collart 2024 though a couple of studies on Formosan languages have demonstrated that this is actually possible (see for instance Collart & Zeitoun 2024, Ono et al. 2020).

This three-day conference aims to facilitate the exchange and the dialogue between linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on different language areas in East and Southeast Asia, from two main perspectives: theoretical and applied. Through this conference, we hope to offer more visibility about the research that has already been done and to put it in a crosslinguistic perspective to demonstrate that there are indeed many things to do. It will open up promising and exciting opportunities by (i) providing an overview of methodologies and (ii) offering a range of potential research studies.