Tag Archives: conference

Gaja Jarosz Co-Organizes Abstract // Specific Workshop at the Linguistic Summer Institute in Eugene

Together with Canaan Breiss, Emily Morgan, and Volya Kapatsinski, Gaja Jarosz is co-organizing an NSF-sponsored workshop on Abstract and Item-Specific Knowledge Across Domains and Frameworks. The two-day workshop will take place July 27-28, 2025 during the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute in Eugene, Oregon.

We have an exciting program lined up featuring a student poster session (see Call for Abstracts) along with invited talks and panel discussions organized into thematic sessions on the following topics:

  • EVIDENCE: What is the experimental evidence for abstract or item-specific knowledge?
  • MODELING: What does an adequate computationally-explicit, implemented model of simultaneous item-specific and abstract knowledge look like? What are the representations in this model?
  • LEARNING: How do speakers learn item-specific and abstract knowledge from the same data at the same time?
  • BRAIN: What evidence is there for how storage and abstraction are implemented neurally? Are these separate systems,  or merely descriptions of different behaviors of a single system?
  • EVOLUTION: How does storage or abstraction at the level of individual speakers shape a language over time? How have languages evolved to be processable via a combination of storage and abstraction?

Registration for the workshop is now open!

NSF grant awarded to support the third conference on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America

Our colleague, Emiliana Cruz, of the Anthropology Department, and I are very happy to announce that the National Science Foundation has approved funding for the third conference on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America. The conference will be held here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in October, 2018. Besides plenary and contributed addresses and poster sessions, the conference will include two round tables, one devoted to discussing effective techniques for fostering collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, and the other to discussing how to translate linguistic descriptions into useful pedagogical materials to be used in the indigenous communities. A call for papers will be sent out in October, 2017; abstracts will be due 1 March 2018; and decisions about acceptance will be made by a scientific committee by 1 May 2018. (John Kingston)

(This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (NSF BCS-1746391). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.)