Date: Friday 10/02/2023  

Location: C7.4 (Conference room 1.17 and other rooms in C7.4)  

Program:

10:30 – 11:00 Arrival and Registration

11:00 – 11:30 Welcome and Introduction (Room 1.17)
– Welcome by Jakob von Weizsäcker (Minister der Finanzen und für Wissenschaft, Saarland)
– Welcome by Prof. Cornelius König (Vice-President for Internationalization and European Relations, UdS)
– Welcome and introduction by Prof. Elke Teich and Prof. Matthew Crocker (Speakers of CRC 1102)

11:30 – 12:15 Introduction of new SFB-members (Room 1.17)

12:15 – 13:15 Lunch

13:15 – 14:00 Scientific talk: „Interplay of memory and surprisal in language processing“ (Prof. Michael Hahn, UdS) (Room 1.17) (live online talk – Zoom link upon request via email: sfb1102@uni-saarland.de)

14:00 – 17:00 Poster session of CRC projects

17:00 – Closing reception

Coffee and refreshments will be available throughout the day.

At 16:45 a group photo of the whole SFB will be taken in/outside of building C7.4.

Date: Thursday, February 9th
Location: C7.4 (Conference room 1.17 and foyer)

Preliminary program:
10:00 – 11:00 Workshop: Merel Scholman and Katja Häuser (PhD students only)
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee break
11:15 – 11:55 Practice defense by Lisa Schäfer
12:00 – 12:40 Practice defense by Julia Meßmer
12:40 – 14:00 Lunch break at Mensa
14:00 – 15:00 Poster session
15:00 – 15:20 Short talk by Sarah Jablotschkin
15:20 – 15:40 Short talk by Beeke Muhlack
15:40 – 16:00 Short talk by Omnia Ibrahim
16:00 – 17:00 MGK meeting (PhD students only)

At 14:45 a group photo of the PhD students will be taken in/outside of building C7.4.

Project B3 published a manuscript in the Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020. The article investigates acceptability contrasts between antecedent-target mismatches under sluicing and finds that information theoretic processing constraints can explain the data better than previously proposed syntactic constraints:

https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/134536

Project B3 starts a new SFB-wide working group on the relation between information structure and information theory. Our kickoff meeting is going to take place on January 12 at 4:15 pm in Room 2.02 in Building A2.2 and online on MS Teams. We invite everybody who is interested in this topic to join us! 

Project B3 warmly welcomes Bozhidara Hristova (know as „Dari“) to its team, who joined us as a PhD student in October 2022. Dari has recently obtained a master’s degree in Language Theory and Comparative Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart. There, her research focused on phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface, particularly on the meaning and structure of existential sentences. Dari is especially interested in the topic of syntactic alternations (e.g., ellipses, argument alternations) and in the interaction between the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that influence our choice of sentence structure.

We are very proud and happy to announce that a member of Project C1 was awarded her PhD degree in December! 
 
Omnia Ibrahim defended her thesis „Speaker adaptations as a function of message, channel and listener variability“ on 19 December 2022. 
 
Many congratulations to Omnia!

The C1 project and former postdoc James Whang (Seoul National University) will organize a workshop on August 25 2023 in conjunction with Interspeech 2023 in Dublin.

Title: Limits and benefits of information-theoretic perspectives in spoken communication

https://lbit2023.lst.uni-saarland.de/

Invited speakers: Ann Bradlow (Northwestern University) and Okko Räsänen (Tampere University)

We’re very proud and happy to announce that a member of Project A4 was awarded his PhD thesis in December!

Pratik Bhandari defended his thesis “Interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes in spoken language comprehension” on December 7th.

Many congratulations to you!

In our next LangSci colloquium, Natalia Levshina from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics will give a talk on „Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use„.

The virtual talk will take place via Zoom on Thursday (8th December) at 16:15!

New publication by members of project A4 has been accepted to SLT 2022.

„A Data-Driven Investigation of Noise-Adaptive Utterance Generation with Linguistic Modification“ by Anupama Chingacham, Vera Demberg, Dietrich Klakow.