We are pleased to announce that the SAARTEC project, based at the Chair of English Linguistics and Translation Studies of our department, has been awarded start-up funding from Saarland University. The project will begin in January 2026 and will run for 12 months, structured into five working phases. A total of approximately 15.000 EUR has been granted to support its development.

SAARTEC aims to build a naturalistic-eye-tracking-while-reading corpus of English scientific texts that will provide new insights into the cognitive processing of various features of English academic writing. Once completed, the corpus will be made available online and is expected to become a valuable resource for research in English linguistics and psycholinguistics.

Project T1 is organising a workshop on Easy German comparing research to real-life experiences today, December 8th, from 14:00 to 18:00. More information here.

In our next LangSci talk, Louis ten Bosch, Guest researcher at the Department of Language and Communication and at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University, will give a talk on „AI, Automatic Speech Recognition and phonetics„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams December 18th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Gaurav Kamath,  PhD student in Linguistics at McGill University and Mila, and a member of the McGill University Linguistic Department’s Montreal Quantitative and Computational Linguistics Laboratory, will give a talk on „Measuring Word Meaning Change Across Time and Speaker Age„.

Please note that the hybrid talk will take place at an unusual time and room! In building C7 2, room -1.05 and on MS Teams November 27th at 16:15!

A new journal article by Annemarie Verkerk from C7 has been published in Nature Human Behaviour. The paper, titled „Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses“, investigates global linguistic patterns („universals“) using Grambank and Bayesian analyses, finding statistical proof that about a third of the proposed grammatical universals are supported. This suggests that shared cognitive and communicative pressures guide languages toward similar structures rather than random evolution.

You can access the full article here.

Congratulations on this outstanding achievement!

A paper by members of project A6 has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: „Unexpected words that become your best memories: How sentential constraint and word expectedness affect memory retrieval“ by Gerrit Höltje, Regine Bader, Julia A. Meßmer, Doruntinë Zogaj and Axel Mecklinger.

Access the publication here and the full journal here.

We are very proud to announce that the paper by Ariun-Erdene Tumurchuluun, Yusser Al Ghussin, David Mareček, Josef Van Genabith, Koel Dutta Chowdhury won the best paper award at the Multilingual Representation Learning 2025 WS at EMNLP 2025.

You can find the paper „TenseLoC: Tense Localization and Control in a Multilingual LLM“ here.

Many Congratulations!

In our next LangSci talk, Amanda Yuile,  Research Fellow in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the Mass General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, will give a talk on „The role of event knowledge in children’s reference comprehension„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 20th at 16:15!

As part of its Emmy Noether program, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding Michael Hahn’s work with 1.4 million euros. The project entitled „Understanding and overcoming architectural limitations in neural language models“ will develop new machine learning architectures that make AI systems more robust and logically capable. Current large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are based on the Transformer architecture, which can fundamentally limit their logical reasoning abilities. The project will design model architectures that overcome these limitations and lay methodological foundations for more capable AI systems.

Many congratulations to Michael Hahn on this great accomplishment!

In our first LangSci talk of the semester, George Walkden, Professor of English Linguistics and General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, will give a talk on „Implicational universals and a self-actuating gradient model of morphosyntactic change„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 6th at 16:15!