Call for abstracts

Introduction:

The study of cross-linguistic variability between languages has been a central question in linguistic theory and has delivered important insights on 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 grammars 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. There are also 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.

Call for Abstracts:

We invite abstracts and presentations on:

• phonetic/phonological/lexical/sentence/discourse processing

• computational modelling

• corpus-based psycholinguistics

• neurobiological investigations of language

• language acquisition in mono-/bi-/multilingual contexts

and all other areas of psycholinguistics in the context of the subcontinent’s linguistic landscape.