Linguistics @ Cyprus

Here a quick post, on a more or less personal note. Even though we may be far away from a lot of places, Cyprus does have a growing (bio)linguistic community. Here are just three interesting events:

LOT 1 (international postgraduate student conference): http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-675.html
GACL 4 (forget the acronym): http://www.punksinscience.org/kleanthes/GACL-4/index.html
LDG 3 (Language Disorders in Greek): http://www.euc.ac.cy/easyconsole.cfm/id/1056

If any BIOLINGUISTICS BLOG reader is interested in participating, and even giving a paper, please send me a quick email! LOT 1 and LDG 3 don't have much of a "website" and GACL 4's is basic (should I say "crappy"?), but there you are. Naama Friedmann, Theo Marinis, Alex Perovic, and Ken Wexler, all in two days, and Sonja Eisenbeiss, Tom McFadden, Peter Patrick, and Barbara Lust in three days a month earlier is no small feat by anyone's reckoning.

These events are, of course, to some extent pushed by the recently formed Cyprus Acquisition Team (CAT) and the new Gen-CHILD Project we were awarded. (Both sites are also still in development.)

We can organize crash space and try to keep all other costs low if anyone's interested in coming out here!

Kleanthes

Recently in the headlines

• Nature EMBOR: Speak to me, melody: Music's biological roots with language under scrutiny
• SD: Form or function: Evolution takes different paths, genetic study shows
• NYT: From a songbird, new insights into the brain (this has gotten a lot of coverage)
• SD: New period of brain 'plasticity' created with transplanted embryonic cells
• arXiv: The pace of evolution across fitness valleys
• SD: Why certain symmetries are never observed in nature
• SD: Hyenas' laughter signals decoded
• SD: How does a heart know when it's big enough?
• SD: In brain-injured children, early gesturing predicts language delays
• SD: Autism susceptibility genes identified
• SD: Words influence infants' cognition from first months of life
• SD: Human brain becomes tuned to voices and emotional tone during infancy

Conference on Language, Nature, & Cognition at VSSoL

Conference on Language, Nature, and Cognition at the Verbum Summer School of Linguistics
July 16-17, 2010 in Vigo, Galicia, Spain.

Abstracts are invited for presentation at the Verbum Summer School of Linguistics (VSSoL) Conference on Language, Nature, and Cognition, on any aspect of theoretical linguistics, experimental linguistics, and biolinguistics. There will also be a poster session.

Invited speakers are Juan Uriagereka (University of Maryland) and Manuel Carreiras (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language).

Call for papers (due May 21, 2010): here.

Conference: Understanding language: Forty years down the garden path

Organized by the university of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Conference site: Palacio Miramar - Donostia / San Sebastián

http://www.sc.ehu.es/scrwwwsu/index.htm

The conference takes as a starting point the famous garden path sentence The horse raced past the barn fell, appeared forty years ago in the seminal paper “The Cognitive Basis of Linguistics Structures” by Thomas G. Bever, one of the founders of the field of language processing. This meeting brings together some of the most outstanding researchers in the field, to discuss current frontiers in our understanding of language within cognitive science, and to assess the progress made during these four decades of research in language processing.

PROGRAM

Monday, June 28th

9:00 Welcome and Presentation: Itziar Laka, Montserrat Sanz and Pello Salaburu

9:15-10:00 Mike Tanenhaus, University of Rochester
Introduction to the course. On the Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures: Themes that have endured.

SESSION 1. The crosslinguistic brain and language
Chair: Itziar Laka, University of the Basque Country

10:00-11:00 Jacques Mehler SISSA-ISAS CNS, Trieste, Italy.
Languages in the infant brain

11:00-12:00 Manuel Carreiras, Basque Center on Brain, Cognition and Language
Mechanisms of Agreement

12:00-12:30 BREAK

12:30-13:30 Inna Bornkessel, University of Mamberg, Germany
Neurotypology: Modelling cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the neurocognition of language comprehension

13:30-14:30 Yosef Grodzinsky McGuill University, USA
Changing perspectives on the functional role of some language regions in the brain

14:30-16:30 LUNCH

16:30-18:00 ROUND TABLE, GENERAL DISCUSSION:
The Crosslinguistic Brain and Language
Theme discussant: Douglass Saddy
Participants: Tanenhaus, Mehler, Carreiras, Grodzinsky

Tuesday June 29th

SESSION 2. The evolution of language and language universals
Chair: Pello Salaburu, University of the Basque Country

10:00-11:00 Massimo Piattelli Palmarini, University of Arizona, USA
Comprehension, production and linearization in a new evolutionary perspective

11:00-12:00 Robert Berwick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Three Models for the Description of Language Complexity

12:00-12:30 BREAK

12:30-13:30 Douglass Saddy, University of Reading, UK
Measuring language universals in the brain

13:30-14:30 Thomas Bever, University of Arizona, USA
Where do Linguistic Universals come from?

14:30-16:30 LUNCH

16:30-18:00 ROUND TABLE, GENERAL DISCUSSION
The Evolution of Language and Language Universals
Theme discussant: Colin Phillips
Participants: Piatelli-Palmarini, Berwick, Saddy, Stabler and Bever.

Wednesday, June 30th


SESSION 3. The relations between language production and perception
Chair of the session: José Manuel Igoa, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

9:00:10:00 Maryellen C. MacDonald, University of Wisconsin-Madison,USA
The Production Basis of Language Comprehension: Evidence from Relative Clauses

10:00-11:00 Gary Dell, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Implicit learning in the language production system is revealed in speech errors

11:00-12:00 Luciano Fadiga, Italian Institute of Technology, U. Ferrara, Italy
From Action to Language: Evidence and Speculations

12:00-12:30 BREAK

12:30-13:30 William Idsardi, University of Maryland, USA
Statistical generalizations in language behaviors

13:30-14:30 Edward Gibson, Massachusetts Institute of technology, USA
Language above the word: Quantitative investigations of syntactic representations and processes

14:30-16:30 LUNCH

16:30-18:00 ROUND TABLE, GENERAL DISCUSSION:
The Relations between Language Production and Perception
Theme discussant: Thomas Bever
Participants: MacDonald, Dell, Fadiga, Kotz, Gibson

Thursday, July 1st

SESSION 4. The garden path today - comprehension models
Chair: Montserrat Sanz

9:00-10:00 Sonia Kotz, Max Planck Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Germany
Syntactic ambiguities: from linguistic structure to brain correlates

10:00-11:00 Michael Tanenhaus University of Rochester, USA
On the mechanisms underlying real-time language comprehension

11:00-12:00 Gerry Altmann, University of York, UK
Anticipating the garden path: the horse raced past the barn ate the cake


12:00-12:30 BREAK

12:30-13:30 Edward Stabler UCLA, USA
Syntax, semantics and pragmatics in incremental interpretation

13:30-14:30 Colin Phillips, University of Maryland, USA
Grammatical Illusions: Where you see them, where you don't

14:30-16:30 LUNCH

16:30:17:30 ROUND TABLE AND GENERAL DISCUSSION:
The Garden Path Today- Comprehension Models
Theme discussant: Yosef Grodzinsky
Participants: Kotz, Tanenhaus, Altmann, Idsardi, Phillips

17:30-18:30 Conclusions and predictions for future research
Thomas Bever University of Arizona
Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, University of Arizona

Call for papers: Language as social coordination

Conference: Language as Social Coordination: An Evolutionary Perspective
Warsaw - September 16-18, 2010

[via Evolutionary Linguistics:]
The conference emphasizes the biological nature of language, underscoring its coordinative function. The aim of the conference is to 1) show continuity of natural language with other informational systems in biology; 2) show that language arises from and is crucial for human co-action.

Taking an evolutionary and comparative perspective, will draw attention to the kinds of social coordination that arise without (human-like) language, and that contribute to the background used by (and present in) linguistic communication. By so doing, it will be easier to appreciate the qualitatively different types of co-ordination that are specific to humans and language-dependent. The evolutionary perspective will help with coming to view language as a natural phenomenon, continuous with other 'informational' systems at various levels of biological organization, that serve not only vertical (inter-generational) transmission of structure but also horizontal coordination both within and between organisms.

Invited Speakers:
- John Collier, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
- Terrence Deacon, University of California at Berkeley
- Merlin Donald, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
- Don Favareau, National University of Singapore
- Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, Yale University and University of Connecticut
- Bruno Galantucci, Yeshiva University
- Don Ross, University of Alabama at Birmingham and University of Cape Town
- Colwyn Trevarthen, University of Edinburgh

Call for Papers (due April 30): here

Recently in the headlines

• BBC: Monkeys learn more from females
• SD: Great apes know they could be wrong
• SD: Evolution more rapid than Darwin thought
• SD: Songbirds yield insight into speech production
• SD: Brain naturally follows scientific method? Less effort to register 'predictable' images
  
• New Scientist: Why teenagers find learning a drag
• New Scientist: Mind-reading gorillas love a good game
  
• NPR: The evolution of symbolic language
  
• NYT: Exhibition review: Hall of Human Origins
  

NASSLLI 2010

Fourth North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information
June 20-26, 2010 - Bloomington, IN
now open for registration: http://www.indiana.edu/~nasslli/

The call for participation reads:
"The North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) is a summer school with classes in the interface between computer science, linguistics, and logic.

After previous editions at Stanford University, Indiana University, and UCLA, NASSLLI will return to Bloomington, Indiana, June 20–26, 2010. The summer school, loosely modeled on the long-running ESSLLI series in Europe, will consist of a number of courses and workshops, selected on the basis of the proposals. Courses and workshops meet for 90 or 120 minutes on each of five days, June 21–25, and there will be tutorials on June 20 and a day-long workshop on June 26. The instructors are prominent researchers who volunteer their time and energy to present basic work in their disciplines. Many are coming from Europe just to teach at NASSLLI.

NASSLLI courses are aimed at graduate students and advanced undergraduates in wide variety of fields. The instructors know that people will be attending from a wide range of disciplines, and they all are pleased to be associated with an interdisciplinary school. The courses will also appeal to post-docs and researchers in all of the relevant fields.

We hope to have 100-150 participants. In addition to classes in the daytime, the evenings will have social events and plenary lectures. Bloomington is a wonderful place to visit, known for arts, music, and ethnic restaurants. All of this is within 15 minutes walking from campus. We aim to make NASSLLI fun and exciting."