Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS)
13-15 February 2025, Saarbruecken, Germany

We are delighted to announce the upcoming 2nd edition of the conference on „Rational Approaches in Language Science“ (RAILS), which will be organized by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1102 „Information Density and Linguistic Encoding“. The central theme of this conference is (bounded) rational communication, i.e. the idea that language users continuously strive to optimize their means of communication to effectively convey their intended messages. Thus, rational communication has consequences on how recipients encode and remember information, and it also impacts language variation and change.

RAILS will bring together researchers from various fields investigating how information dynamics, rational communication and memory interact with language use, variation, and change. We welcome contributions on (1) how interlocutors process and update information in diverse situational contexts; (2) how language use is adapted to certain contexts and intended referents and (3) how linguistic and conceptual information is stored and maintained in short- and long-term memory. Ultimately, the goal of the conference is to gain deeper insights into the complexities of language use and its dynamic nature in different settings. We invite submissions from researchers across the language sciences – including speech science, theoretical linguistics, empirical linguistics, psycholinguistics and neuroscience, computational linguistics, as well as language development, change and evolution – who apply rational probabilistic explanations to linguistic phenomena, or bring novel experimental findings to bear on such accounts.

Instructions for presenters

Poster presenters: Poster boards are portrait format, German A0, width: 85cm, height: 119cm.
Poster printing options are (1) directly on Campus: SULB printing office (one day notice!) at https://www.sulb.uni-saarland.de/en/courses-and-learning-spaces/fotostelle/printing-and-copying, (2) in the city center COD Büroservice at https://cod.de/print.html (Bleichstraße 22-24).

Plenary talks: Talks are slated for 20mins, plus 10mins for questions. Please send us a copy of your slides before the talk session (rails2025(at)lst.uni-saarland.de).

• Program
• Booklet
• Practical information

Keynote speakers

Mark Dingemanse Radboud University Reasoning in interaction

Richard Futrell University of California, Irvine Prediction and Locality in Language and Language Models

Adele Goldberg Princeton University Rational Productivity: using a system of learned constructions to express new message

Rachel Ryskin University of California, Merced Language comprehension adapted to the environment

Practical information

Pre-conference socials (Warm-up)