Colloquium - SFB 1102

Distinguished Speakers in Language Science, the joint Colloquium of the Department of Language Science & Technology and SFB 1102, takes place Thursdays, 16:15, Building A2.2, room 1.20.2, unless indicated otherwise.

Links to LangSci calendar: iCal HTML

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
16/04/2026	João Veríssimo	tba
30/04/2026	Katherina Ehret	tba
07/05/2026	Aine Ito	The Limits and Mechanisms of Prediction in Language Comprehension	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
21/05/2026	Judith Holler	Using and comprehending language in face-to-face conversation	RAILS Special Series - online only!
28/05/2026	Ryan Hubbard	tba
25/06/2026	Roland Meyer	Measuring multilingualism and language mixing in corpus texts

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
06/11/2025	George Walkden	Implicational universals and a self-actuating gradient model of morphosyntactic change
20/11/2025	Amanda Yuile	The role of event knowledge in children's reference comprehension
27/11/2025	Gaurav Kamath	Measuring Word Meaning Change Across Time and Speaker Age	Unusual time (10:15) and room (C7 2, room -1.05)!
18/12/2025	Louis ten Bosch	AI, Automatic Speech Recognition and phonetics	Postponed!
22/01/2026	Roland Meyer	Measuring multilingualism and language mixing in corpus texts	Postponed!
29/01/2026	Nikolett Mus	The role of Information Structure in the OV-to-VO shift in West-Siberian languages	New Year's get-together after the talk!
05/02/2026	Falk Hüttig	The Enhanced Literate Mind Hypothesis

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
08/05/2025	Micha Heilbron	Language models for cognitive neuroscience: Two success stories and a warning	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
12/06/2025	Leigh Fernandez	Is semantic prediction modulated by executive resources or linguistic experience?
26/06/2025	Milena Rabovsky	The N400 and P600 ERP components as learning signals driving implicit and explicit memory formation	Postponed!
03/07/2025	Kyle Mahowald	Linguistic Insights from Language Models	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
10/07/2025	Felicitas Kleber	Does phonetic bias plus spoken interaction add up to sound change?

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
17/10/2024	Amalia Arvaniti	What can cross-linguistic research on spontaneous speech tell us about intonation meaning?
24/10/2024	Benjamin Bergen	Large Language Models are impressive but we still need grounding to explain human cognition	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
07/11/2024	Livio Gaeta	Between Productivity and Creativity: Snowclones we live by
14/11/2024	Yang Xu	Evolution of the lexicon	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
28/11/2024	Alane Suhr	The Role of Joint Embodiment in Situated Language-Based Interactions	Joint event with the RTG Neuroexplicit Models
12/12/2024	Wing-Yee Chow	Incremental prediction in real-time language comprehension: from meaning to pitch contour	Only online!
23/01/2025	Shiri Lev-Ari	Language from a social networks perspective	New Year's get-together after the talk!
30/01/2025	Agnieszka Chmiel	Lexical processing in simultaneous interpreting - insights from experimental and corpus-based research	Only online!
06/02/2025	Elsi Miia Kaiser	The challenges of understanding and being understood: Psycholinguistic explorations of communicative efficiency	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
11/03/2025	Haim Dubossarsky	Frontiers and Gaps in Lexical Semantic Change Research	Unusual time and date! Tuesday at 3.30pm
14/03/2025	Jet Hoek	Not all discourse is created equal: On the effects of discourse structure on coreference	Unusual time and date! Friday at 9.15am

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
18/04/2024	Steffen Eger	Syntactic language change in English and German
24/04/2024	Niels Taatgen	Cognitive skills: the building blocks of human intelligence	Please note: Unusual date and time!
25/04/2024	Byung-Doh Oh	The bigger-is-worse effects of model size and training data of large language model surprisal on human reading times
06/06/2024	Shubhra Kanti Karmaker	Democratizing AI through Controlled Narrative Generation and Knowledge Grounding
13/06/2024	Svetlana Vetchinnikova	Individual variation in perceptual and usage-based chunking
20/06/2024	Christopher Sapp	Length and word order within Noun Phrases in Early New High German Noun
04/07/2024	Wing-Yee Chow	Incremental prediction in real-time language comprehension: from meaning to pitch contour	Only online!
18/07/2024	Luigi Grisoni	Brain correlates of perceptual, semantic, and action prediction	Only online!

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
09/11/2023	Karin Harbusch	Two new German corpora and their use: (1) A German Parallel Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis Corpus, and (2) A Treebank of Leichte Sprache texts
16/11/2023	Sharid Loáiciga	Keeping reference in pre-trained language models and multimodal corpora
14/12/2023	Stefan Th. Gries	MERGEmultidim: recent developments for a sequential and largely information-theoretic approach to multi-'word' units
11/01/2024	Christian Bentz	Language complexity in shallow and deep time	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
18/01/2024	Seana Coulson	Distributional Semantics and Embodied Meaning: What do Large Language Models have to say?	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
01/02/2024	Samar Husain	Limits to prediction during sentence comprehension in SOV languages	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
08/02/2024	James Michaelov	What can language models tell us about the N400?	RAILS Special Series - on site in Saarbrücken!
22/02/2024	Arielle Borovsky	Building semantic networks in the early lexicon
19/03/2024	Michael Franke	Cognitive & Language Sciences in the age of Large Language Models	Please note: Unusual date and time!

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
20/04/2023	Hannah Rohde	Informativity in cooperative communication	RAILS Special Online Series!
11/05/2023	Okko Räsänen	Making computers learn language like infants: what, why and how
25/05/2023	Joel Wallenberg	Syntactic Planning and the Information Threshold
22/06/2023	Nicole Gotzner	Alternatives in linguistic theory and language processing	only online!
13/07/2023	Jan Chromý	When and where did it happen? Systematic differences in recall of core and optional sentence information.

Date	Speaker	Title	Notes
20/10/2022	Jennifer Arnold	You learn what you hear: Discourse exposure guides pronoun comprehension
21/10/2022	Ann Bradlow	Non-adaptative and adaptive phonetic variation \| L2 speech and clear speech	Unusual date!
28/10/2022	Preslav Nakov	Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic: from Fake News to Harmful Content	Unusual date!
03/11/2022	Carola Trips	Becoming selfish: The rise of reflexivity and self compounds in Middle English under the contact hypothesis
17/11/2022	Jacob Eisenstein	Detecting Intellectual Influence from Dynamic Word Embeddings: Applications to Historical Newspapers and Contemporary Research Articles	RAILS Special Online Series!
08/12/2022	Natalia Levshina	Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use	RAILS Special Online Series!
15/12/2022	Sebastian Nordhoff	Open Access, reusability and reproducibility in linguistics
02/02/2023	Kevin Tang	Prosody leaks into the memories of words: Evidence from 1,655 speakers and an account in dynamic field theory

Date	Speaker	Title
21/04/2022	John Hale	The brain's language network in typological perspective
28/04/2022	Florian Hintz	Individual differences in language skills
09/06/2022	Bart Defrancq	Interpreting Studies: Approaching language usage from a remote corner of the universe
23/06/2022	Sebastian Schuster	How contextual are contextual language models?
30/06/2022	Jonathan Berant	Compositional generalization in the era of pre-trained language models
07/07/2022	Michael Carl	Translation Process Research and the Changing Notion of Representation
21/07/2022	Lisa Beinborn	Cognitive Plausibility of Representational Transfer

Date	Speaker	Title
20/01/2022	Mariya Toneva	Bridging Language in Machines with Language in the Brain
02/02/2022	Bernd Meyer	Predicting human speech perception using deep phoneme classifiers
03/02/2022	Edward Gibson	Language processing over a noisy channel
10/02/2022	Martin Cooke	Perception of distorted speech

Date	Speaker	Title
15/04/2021	Sebastian Padó	Words, Categories, and Entities
22/04/2021	Martin Pickering	Understanding dialogue: Language use and social interaction
06/05/2021	Klaus von Heusinger	Referential form and discourse prominence
20/05/2021	Dirk Hovy	Five Sources of Biases and Ethical Issues in NLP, and What to Do about Them
10/06/2021	Anna Papafragou	Informativeness in language production and acquisition
17/06/2021	Felix Schönbrodt	An introduction to Open Science: doing transparent, credible and efficient research
24/06/2021	Martin Corley	It's the way that you say it: effects of disfluency on language comprehension
01/07/2021	Alan Akbik	Few-Shot Learning for Natural Language Processing with TARS and Flair
08/07/2021	Katharina Kann	Towards Natural Language Processing Systems for All Languages and Tasks
15/07/2021	Sandrine Zufferey	Individual differences in teenagers and adults’ mastery of connectives from the written mode
22/07/2021	Marianne Hundt	From the Page to the Screen: Digitising 18th-century Manuscripts for Research in Linguistics

Date	Speaker	Title
29/10/2020	Oliver Bott	Implicit Causality and Explicit Consequentiality
12/11/2020	Frank Seifart	Studying speech rate cross-linguistically: Resource building and case studies on final lengthening and pause probabilities
10/12/2020	Søren Wichmann	Advances in computational historical linguistics
14/01/2021	Joost Rommers	Memory consequences of predictive language processing
04/02/2021	Louis ten Bosch	Computational models of human word comprehension

Date	Speaker	Title
17/10/2019	Lena Kästner	Four Types of Experiments
18/11/2019	Andy Wedel	Signal evolution within the word and the grammar
21/11/2019	Antonio Toral	Translationese and Translation Universals in Machine Translation
12/12/2019	Ellie Pavlick	What should constitute natural language "understanding"?
16/01/2020	Sabine Schulte im Walde	Distributional and Multi-Modal Models for Compositionality and Figurative Language: German Noun Compounds and Particle Verbs
23/01/2020	Jörg Tiedemann	Lost in meaning - found in Translation Natural language understanding with multilingual data
30/01/2020	Cynthia Clopper	Social information, phonetic reduction, and predictability in the speech signal
13/02/2020	Noah Goodman	Inference and information: the computational basis of referential language use

Date	Speaker	Title
11/04/2019	Thomas C. Gunter	Some thoughts on communication, gestures, and the language system
16/05/2019	Karin Verspoor	Concepts, Relations, and Queries in Biomedicine: The case for Semantic Search
20/05/2019	Stefan Frank	A connectionist model of code-switching in bilingual sentence production
11/06/2019	Chiara Gambi	Predicting to learn? The role of prediction (error) in children’s language processing and acquisition
13/06/2019	Marc Swerts	On different forms of linguistic adaptation in spoken dialogues
27/06/2019	Dong Ngyuen	Language variation and change in social media: a computational perspective
18/07/2019	Ans van Kemenade	Diachronic shifts in the interaction between syntax and pragmatics: the case of English

Date	Speaker	Title
18/10/2018	Elsi Kaiser	Implicit elements in language: Psycholinguistic investigations of their interpretation and discourse status
25/10/2018	Katharina Spalek	The role of focus alternatives in discourse coherence
07/11/2018	Satoshi Sekine	Structuring Wikipedia for "a machine that can explain its decision in language”
29/11/2018	Zenzi Griffin	Talking and timing
05/12/2018	Pius ten Hacken	Compounding and other Phenomena at the Boundary between Word Formation and Syntax
13/12/2018	Arielle Borovsky	Prediction in a changing world
07/01/2019	Jason Eisner	Recovering Syntactic Structure from Surface Features
24/01/2019	Petra Hendriks	Explaining individual variation in referential choices through cognitive modeling
20/02/2019	Ann Bradlow	Language-independent talker specificity in bilingual speech: Using a multi-lingual speech corpus to identify individual “traits” that persist across L1 and L2 “states”

Date	Speaker	Title
03/05/2018	David Reitter	Language models as models of human language processing? Evidence, from priming and information density in dialogue to language acquisition.
17/05/2018	Detmar Meurers	Modeling the linguistic complexity of language input and output - and linking the two.
23/05/2018	Raul Fernandez	From Handcrafted Features to Implicitly-learned Representations: Creating the Next Generation of Expressive and Natural Speech Synthesis.
24/05/2018	Shalom Lappin	Modelling the Influence of Document Context on Human Acceptability Judgements
28/05/2018	Paula Rubio-Fernandez	Saying too much can be efficient: Evidence from language production/comprehension studies
07/06/2018	Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon	The constant flow of linguistic information and word order.
14/06/2018	Nivedita Mani	Prediction a piece of cake - really?

Date	Speaker	Title
30/11/2017	Kilu von Prince	The syntax-morphology trade-off
14/12/2017	Jiří Zámečník	Information density and the rational speaker: How do speakers manipulate the information density?
11/01/2018	Hans Rutger Bosker	How listeners normalize speech: evidence from neural oscillations
25/01/2018	Jonas Obleser	The signal and the noise: A neural-oscillations perspective on the listening brain

Date	Speaker	Title
01/06/2017	T. Florian Jaeger	Causal inferences under uncertainty in speech perception and production
22/06/2017	Susanne Gahl	28 Years of Vowels: Effects of talker age on pronunciation
29/06/2017	Michael Dunn	The evolution of word order over a noisy channel
13/07/2017	Victor Ferreira	Syntactic Entrainment as a Possible Mechanism for Learning the Meanings of Syntactic Constructions

Date	Speaker	Title
10/11/2016	Torgrim Solstad	On the processing of explanations in discourse: Evidence from eyetracking during reading
17/11/2016	John Nerbonne	Sociolinguistics and Computational Linguistics
24/11/2016	Alice Turk	The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and Prosodic Structure
01/12/2016	Milena Rabovsky	N400 amplitudes reflect change in a probabilistic representation of meaning: Evidence from a neural network model
08/12/2016	Janet Pierrehumbert	Remembering and generalizing from examples of words
15/12/2016	Falk Huettig	The effect of learning to read on the neural systems for vision and language: A longitudinal approach with illiterate participants
02/02/2017	Elmar Nöth	Remote Monitoring of Neurodegeneration through Speech
09/02/2017	CLARIN-D Zentrum UdS	CLARIN-D - support for archiving and sharing linguistic data and tools
16/02/2017	Ido Dagan	Open Knowledge Representation for Texts
06/03/2017	John Goldsmith	Learning morphology: something old, something new
14/03/2017	Petra Wagner	Measuring and Modeling Prosodic Variation

Date	Speaker	Title
07/04/2016	Roman Yangarber	Modeling Linguistic Relationships and Language Evolution
14/04/2016	Kimmo Koskenniemi	Relating cognate words directly
15/04/2016	Hinrich Schütze	Embeddings! For which objects? For which objectives?
21/04/2016	Terttu Nevalainen	Historical sociolinguistics from philology to computer science
28/04/2016	Fotis Jannidis	Challenges of a corpus-based history of the German novel
10/05/2016	Martha Palmer	Designing abstract meaning representations
12/05/2016	Degeneracy and language learning	Degeneracy and language learning
02/06/2016	Moreno Coco	When Expectancies Collide: the Interaction between Stimulus Plausibility and Congruency during a Cross-Modal Verification Task
16/06/2016	Anthony Kroch	Detecting abstract linguistic properties through the study of corpus data
19/06/2016	Mark Steedman	A Distributional Theory of Content for NLP
07/07/2016	Michael Franke	Probabilistic pragmatics, rational analysis and data-driven inference
21/07/2016	Albert Kim	The neurocognitive mechanisms of on-line language comprehension: from perception to integration and back again
18/08/2016	Miriam R. L. Petruck	FrameNet: Current Status, Recent Activity, and Future Plans

Date	Speaker	Title
10/09/2015	Leon Bergen	Pragmatic strategies for efficient communication
01/10/2015	Jacob Eisenstein	Distributed Semantics for Automatically Classifying Discourse Relations
22/10/2015	Raphael Berthele and Jan Vanhove	Spotting cross-linguistic similarities: Stimulus- and participant-related factors in cognate recognition
16/12/2015	Ted Sanders	Causality and Subjectivity in discourse and cognition; Evidence from cross-linguistic analyses, acquisition and processing
17/12/2015	Petra Schumacher	The neurophysiology of referential processing
14/01/2016	Uriel Cohen Priva	Differences between information in language and artificial communication systems
28/01/2016	Caroline Sporleder	Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities: Chances and Challenges
04/02/2016	Shanley Allen	Complex structures and garden paths in L2 sentence processing
11/02/2016	Yvette Graham	Can machine translation be evaluated by the crowd alone?
25/02/2016	Charlotte Gooskens	Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe

Date	Speaker	Title
21/04/2015	Richard Sproat	The Statistics of Non-Linguistic Symbol Systems
30/04/2015	Martin Hackl	On the Acquisition and Processing of Only: Question Answer Congruence, Scalar Presupposition, and the Structure of ALT(S)s
21/05/2015	Kara D. Federmeier	Doing a double take: Hemispheric contributions to language processing
11/06/2015	Ivan Titov	Learning Shallow Semantics with Little or No Supervision
16/06/2015	Shuly Wintner	Automatic Identification of Translationese: Highlighting the nature of translation
18/06/2015	Reinhold Häb-Umbach	Unsupervised Language Acquisition from Raw Speech
23/06/2015	Francis Bond	Cudgeling our brains over possessive idioms
25/06/2015	David Schlangen	Dialogue Processing in Time and Space
02/07/2015	François Pellegrino	A Crosslinguistic Account on Speech Information Rate
09/07/2015	Francesco Vespignani	Idioms and fixed expressions as linguistic tools to study prediction and integration during sentence comprehension
16/07/2015	Tamara Berg	Learning from Descriptive Text
23/07/2015	Michael White	Locality Effects and Ambiguity Avoidance in Natural Language Generation

Date	Speaker	Title
27/11/2014	Frank Keller	How Humans (and Machines) Integrate Language and Vision: ImagenDescription as a Test Case
11/12/2014	Klinton Bicknell	Language comprehension as rational probabilistic inference on perceptual input
08/01/2015	Valerie Hazan	Speaker adaptations in spontaneous speech in challenging communicative conditions
15/01/2015	Michael Ramscar	Nonlinear dynamics of lifelong learning: The myth of cognitive decline
29/01/2015	Jon Dehdari	A Neurophysiologically-Inspired Statistical Language Model