We are looking forward to our last SFB PhD day, followed by a BBQ and pub quiz. The PhD day will take place this Friday, June 19th, in building C7.4. Please find the programme attached below:

13:15 Opening/ Oral talks Session I (chair: Uliana Sentsova)
Miriam Schulz – Is Prediction-by-Production Winner-Takes-All? Evidence from Reading
Times and Brain Potentials (30 min)
Sergei Bagdasarov – Formulaicity Across Time and Register: A Diachronic Comparison of
Multi-word Expressions in English Scientific vs General Language Texts (30 min)

14:15 Coffee break

14:30 Poster Session
Isabell Landwehr + Carmen Schacht – CoBra: A Compound Branching Resource for
Nominal Triconstituent Compounds in English and German
Christina Pollkläsener – Are duration and type of filler particles connected to the surprisal
of following words?
Andy Dyer – Representing information management across languages
Xinyue Jia – The influence of dependency length on expectancy: Evidence from reading
times and ERPs
Uliana Sentsova – Exploring idiom processing in autoregressive transformers across
languages

15:30 Oral talk Session II (chair: Andrew Dyer)
Celina Rolgeiser – Downstream Consequences of Disconfirmed Predictions across the
Lifespan revealed by an Implicit Memory Test (30 min)
Sofía Aguilar Valdez – Modeling the spread and competition of concepts in scientific
discourse (30 min)

16:30 Closing and BBQ

17:30 Pub Quiz

A paper by C1 has been accepted to Interspeech 2026: „How do word frequency and syllable surprisal affect response time and acoustic duration in sentence formulation?“ by Ivan Yuen, Bernd Möbius, Bistra Andreeva and Mitko Sabev

Our congratulations to all authors!

In our next LangSci talk, Ryan Hubbard, Assistant Professor in the Cognitive division of the Psychology department at the University at Albany, SUNY, will give a talk on „Prediction During Language Comprehension Impacts Downstream Memory„.

The talk will take place only on MS Teams May 28th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Judith Holler, Professor for at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Radboud University, and Senior Investigator at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, will give a talk on „Visual bodily signals as core coordination devices in talk„.

The talk will take place only on MS Teams May 21st at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Aine Ito, Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore, will give a talk on „The Limits and Mechanisms of Prediction in Language Comprehension„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams May 7th at 16:15!

PROGRAM

(mehr …)

In our next LangSci talk, Katharina Ehret, Assistant Professor at the Department of English of the University of Freiburg, will give a talk on „Language contact and morphosyntactic variation in English: towards robust and incremental corpus evidence„.

Please note that the hybrid talk will take place at an unusual time and room! In building C7 4, conference room 1.17 and on MS Teams Wednesday April 30th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, João Veríssimo, Assistant professor at the Laboratory of Psycholinguistics at Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon, will give a talk on „A novel method for detecting the onset of experimental effects in visual world eye-tracking (and other time series) data„.

Please note that the hybrid talk will take place at an unusual time and room! In building C7 4, conference room 1.17 and on MS Teams Wednesday April 15th at 16:15!

On behalf of project B7, we hereby announce the forthcoming colloquium on „Prediction in interpreting: Advances in experimental and corpus-based methods“ on Friday, 6 February. The goal is to create a space where researchers can discuss methodological challenges and best practises on building spoken corpora with ASR, as well as to explore how experimental and corpus-based approaches can complement one another in studying predictability in interpreting. Several outstanding researchers have been invited to present their work and share their best practices. The detailed programme is attached.

One of the guests is Thomas Clark (MIT, https://thomashikaru.github.io/). He will already be in Saarbrücken on Thursday, 5 February. If you are interested in meeting him, please get in touch with Christina Pollkläsener (christina.pollklaesener@uni-saarland.de).

In our next LangSci talk, Nikolette Mus, PhD at the Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), will give a talk on „The role of Information Structure in the OV-to-VO shift in West-Siberian languages„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams January 29th at 16:15!

After the talk we would like to invite you all to celebrate the start of the new year together in building A2.2, room 2.07.1.