Второй день конференции начинается с образовательной программы

Выступают:
⏺Доцент ОТиПЛа МГУ О.И. Беляев
⏺Сотрудник SberAI А.А. Шахматова
⏺а также представители МГУ, НИУ ВШЭ и ИЯз РАН Ю.В. Синицына, Д.Д. Белова и Т.И. Давидюк с рассказом о магистерских и аспирантских программах по лингвистике

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Day 2 kicks off with an educational program!

Featuring talks by:
⏺Dr. Oleg Belyaev (Associate Professor, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Lomonosov MSU)
⏺Anastasia Shakhmatova (Researcher, SberAI)
⏺Plus, representatives from MSU, HSE, and RAS Institute of Linguistics:
Yulia Sinitsyna, Daria Belova, and Tatiana Davidyuk will present MA and PhD programs in linguistics.

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🗣Доклад профессора Китайского Университета Гонконга Dr. Чжэнь Гуан Цая вот-вот начнется!

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Starting now! Prof. Dr. Zhenguang Cai (CUHK) takes the stage!

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Завтра 21.06 приглашаем поделиться впечатлениями от конференции в неформальной атмосфере. Ждём всех участников конференции в кафе «Кинза» (пр. Вернадского, 6).
➡️ Встречаемся у корпуса в 17:20 и идём в тёплой компании

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Tomorrow we invite you to share your conference impressions in a casual setting. Join us at 'Kinza' (6 Vernadskogo Avenue).
➡️ Let's meet at the main building at 17:20 and walk over together

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👀 Доброе субботнее утро!

Спешите скорее в Университет! Сегодня начинаем день докладом Dr. Эман Аль Халаф, доцента Университета Иордании.

Трансляция третьего дня по ссылке!

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Happy Saturday!

Quick - head to campus! Today we're starting the day with a lecture by Dr. Eman Al Khalaf, Associate Professor at the University of Jordan.

Watch live!

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🤔 Наука в диалоге! Не пропустите постерную секцию

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Engage in academic discourse! The poster session awaits your participation.

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🤔 И вот настала она – минута, когда мы подводим итоги и прощаемся с вами!

Какой прекрасный был последний день конференции! Давайте сохраним его в памяти - делитесь вашими лучшими моментами в комментариях

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Here we are at last - at that bittersweet moment of wrapping up and saying goodbye!

What an unforgettable day! Share your magic moments in the comments!

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❓Опрос

Просим ЗДЕСЬ рассказать о своем опыте в экспериментальной лингвистике!

Не более 2 минут ⏱

Ответы помогут нам обосновать проведение конференции в следующем году в грантовой заявке. Спасибо!

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❓Survey

Please take a moment to share your experience in experimental linguistics HERE [in Russian]!

It will only take 2 minutes ⏱

Your feedback is crucial for our grant application to secure funding for next year's conference. Thank you for your contribution!

ONE EXPERIMENTAL DAY
| Meet the experts

🎤 Our first invited speaker is Jennifer Culbertson, Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Jennifer works within the artificial language learning (ALL) framework. Here's how it works: participants are exposed to a small, carefully controlled fragment of a new language, and researchers then observe how that material is learned, reproduced, and transformed. These experiments use a between-groups design — different groups of people learn miniature languages that vary along a single parameter.

📚 So what makes the ALL method so powerful? Typology tells us which structures are common across the world’s languages and which are rare or absent. But the question of why this distribution exists remains open: to what extent do these patterns reflect how humans perceive, recognize, order, and produce linguistic units? ALL allows us to move from description to experimentation, based on a simple hypothesis: if speakers of different languages show similar preferences when learning an artificial grammar, that points to the existence of cognitive constraints.

🔎 Take, for example, Culbertson and colleagues’ work on Greenberg's Universal 18. According to this generalization, if a language has the order Adjective — Noun, it also has Numeral — Noun. The reverse combination — Adj N + N Num — is extremely rare: according to the WALS atlas, it occurs in only 4% of languages. Participants in the experiments were exposed to miniature languages featuring one of four possible word orders, varying in how nouns combined with adjectives and numerals. The results showed that even when the input contained that rare pattern, learners systematically shifted their responses toward typologically more common structures. Crucially, the finding held across speakers of languages with different modifier-noun orders, suggesting a cognitive basis for the pattern rather than simple transfer from the native language.

📈 And this is just one episode in a large, coherent research program. Jennifer and her team have applied the same methodology to a wide range of linguistic problems: how people learn person systems in pronouns (why do some paradigms appear across languages while others don't?); how children and adults differ in learning noun classification systems; why number and person affixes show consistent ordering relative to the root and to each other in morphologically rich languages; and why suffixes are more common than prefixes across the world's languages. In all these cases, artificial language experiments have brought us closer to explaining patterns that were previously only described as statistical tendencies.

❓ This opens up new horizons for research — and at the same time raises the hardest questions. If typologically frequent patterns are so easy to learn, why do rare patterns persist? How do different typological features interact during learning? How similar is learning in the lab to real-world language learning — whether as a first or a second language? We're hoping to get closer to some answers during Jennifer Culbertson's talk on June 18.

📝 Register now!

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ONE EXPERIMENTAL DAY
| Meet the experts

🎤 Our second invited speaker is Jana Willer-Gold, Lecturer at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Her work combines theoretical and experimental approaches and focuses on morphosyntactic variation in agreement, feature markedness, and ellipsis. She is particularly well known for her research on agreement in coordination, that shows remarkable variability even within individual languages. Importantly, her team goes beyond single-language studies and, moreover, uses multiple experimental methodologies.
 
🌐 In a large project on South Slavic languages, Jana and her team investigated how predicates agree with coordinated subjects of different genders. Experiments using elicited production revealed that the “competition” between features is not a balanced game like rock–paper–scissors, but rather a tournament with clear favorites. Masculine gender emerged as the dominant winner, while neuter also turned out to be a strong competitor, often outperforming feminine. The results further show that in coordination, linear order matters more than hierarchical structure: agreement with the first conjunct is less common than agreement with the closest conjunct.
 
💫 Jana and her team also tested the hypothesis that closest-conjunct agreement is an effect of ellipsis. In picture-matching experiments, participants saw sentences like “Sabres and spears collided in the battle”, where the verb agrees with the closest conjunct. If ellipsis were involved, participants would be expected to interpret this as two separate events. However, speakers consistently chose pictures showing a single event, where sabres and spears interact with each other. This shows that closest-conjunct agreement cannot be reduced to ellipsis.
 
❓ Jana Willer-Gold's research also looks at how masculine gender “wins” in resolution. Using self-paced reading experiments in Croatian, two competing hypotheses were tested: whether resolution happens within the coordination itself or in the process of interaction between the goal and the probe. The results show that speakers already expect masculine agreement while processing the coordination, whereas alternative agreement forms cause measurable delays. This supports the idea that resolution mechanisms operate within the coordination structure.
 
If you are interested in how experimental methods help uncover the subtle mechanisms of grammar, don’t miss Jana Willer-Gold's talk. This is a rare opportunity to see how linguistic theory is tested on real data.

📝 Register now!

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ONE EXPERIMENTAL DAY
| Meet the experts

🎤 Our third invited speaker is Ellen Lau, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland and co-director of the KIT-Maryland Magnetoencephalography Center. Her work focuses on how the brain processes language in real time. Ellen uses a wide range of methods, including behavioral experiments, EEG, MEG, and fMRI. Her goal is not only to describe which brain regions are activated during language processing, but also to develop theoretical accounts of the architecture of language itself.
 
🔠 One major line of her work re-examines a basic idea in psycholinguistics called lexicalism. According to this view, the mental lexicon stores lemmas — “ready-made” units that combine meaning, grammar, and sound. However, this idea faces several problems.
 
🌳 For instance, in polysynthetic languages, a single word form can correspond to an entire sentence. This would require a lexicalist model to store an extremely large and redundant number of word forms. Idioms are also difficult to explain in this framework, because their parts can be separated by syntax while the meaning stays the same. English constructions such as pass a law, pass a test, or pass a kidney stone further show that verb interpretation is strongly context-dependent. Suppletion adds another problem: in Hiaki (a Uto-Aztecan language), the verb “to kill” has different forms (me’a and sua) depending on whether the object is singular or plural. This means information about the object must be available before the word is fully spoken, which is hard to explain in a strictly step-by-step lexical model.
 
⚛ To address these issues, Ellen Lau and her colleague propose moving away from the idea of the lemma as a basic building block. Instead, they suggest a non-lexicalist model where syntactic units are abstract and carry neither inherent meaning nor phonological form. Instead, language is built using two separate mappings: (1) from meaning to syntactic structure, and (2) from syntactic structure to phonological realization.
 
➡ In this model, the connections are not one-to-one: a single semantic element may map onto multiple syntactic nodes, and a single syntactic node may be realized by multiple formal elements. For example, in the construction the alarm went off, the meaning “to ring” is split between go and off, while past tense is expressed morphologically and appears as went. The form off corresponds to a syntactic element that does not carry independent lexical meaning. Thus, the boundary between intra-word and sentential structure becomes non-fundamental: the same compositional mechanisms operate both within words and across phrases.
 
Join us to hear Ellen Lau’s talk and learn how new data are changing how we think about language.
 
Registration is open till June 15!

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