Theories of speech perception are complex enough that they require computational models to implement their principles and derive predictions by simulation. Yet until recently, our cognitive models could not address the fundamental challenge of speech perception: listeners achieve phonetic constancy despite a many-to-many mapping (lack of invariance) between acoustics and perceptual categories (phonemes, roughly). Phonetic constancy has been out of scope because most cognitive models operate on abstract, simplified inputs rather than real speech. Current deep learning and transformer-based approaches to automatic speech recognition do not offer a viable alternative. While remarkably powerful, they are not understandable: their complexity obscures the mechanisms that allow them to work, limiting theoretical insights into human speech processing. We need a middle ground: models that are sufficiently simple that we can (begin to) understand them, yet sufficiently realistic to work on real speech. I describe our group’s approach, where we develop the simplest neural networks capable of processing real speech, and compare them to core human behavioral and neural benchmarks. I will discuss a recent discovery that has led us to refine our minimalist approach: modest increases in model depth allow a hierarchical division of labor to emerge that maps onto the cortical hierarchy that supports human speech understanding.

Despite language playing a central role in our everyday lives, the fact that language is a subject that can be researched scientifically is not self-evident for members of the general public (Wagner, Patson & Awani, 2022). In a world in which public trust in science and research is decreasing and public funds for science and education are contested, communication of what we do as researchers and also why we do it becomes more and more important. This also holds for the field of linguistics and more specifically, multilingualism research, where we know that a number of myths about what it means to be multilingual still persist in public opinion (Grosjean, 2010). Public discourse that frames linguistic diversity in schools as a problem, in particular, can have negative effects on multilingual children’s language development and wellbeing (Agirdag, 2017).

In this talk, I would like to present two projects in which we communicate research on language and multilingualism to young children and their parents and teachers at Radboud University. The first project, Kletskoppen (engl. ‘Chatterboxes’), is an initiative by language scientists from a range of disciplines at Radboud University and Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen). We organise festivals and lessons about language, linguistics research and multilingualism for primary-school aged children from diverse linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds across the Netherlands. Kletskoppen’s main goals are (1) to increase children’s enjoyment of language, (2) broad their view of science and (3) encourage children to better appreciate their own linguistic repertoire, which for many is multilingual. More specifically, I will present findings from a recent impact study (Unsworth & Knopp, under review) that investigated the short- and longterm effects of participating in Kletskoppen activities on mono- and multilingual children’s attitudes towards multilingualism. The second project I will report on concerns a citizen science project I conducted with colleagues from Tilburg University: Taaldetectives (engl. ‘Language detectives’), in which children from 75 primary schools across the Netherlands collected a data-set of 5.780 examples of the linguistic landscape of the area surrounding their school. I will reflect on what it means to involve children from that age-group in language science, as well as their teachers and parents. I will also present some preliminary findings concerning their awareness of the socio-pragmatic function of language(s) in their environment as well as their attitudes towards languages and linguistic diversity in their environment.

• Agirdag, O. (2017). 8. Schools in the multilingual city. In G. Marini (Ed.), Urban Europe (pp. 67-74). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048535811-009
• Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and Reality. Harvard University Press.
• Wagner, L., Patson, N. D., & Awani, S. (2022). What does the Public Think about Language Science? Language, 98(4), e224–e249. doi.org/10.1353/lan.2022.0029

During language comprehension, adult speakers rapidly use the available grammatical cues to find out about the argument structure, i.e. the who-does-what-to-whom of the sentence. Across languages, the most common cues for assigning thematic roles are word order or case-marking. While adult speakers can efficiently use these cues when comprehending sentences, it’s not clear how and when children learn to do so. Several studies show that word-order is used from the early childhood, but the evidence is not clear for case making: a few studies point to an early acquisition, while other seem to show that it is developed gradually and is only mastered from 7 years onwards. Additionally, there is little evidence on how bilingual children acquire these cues in each of the languages they are acquiring.

In this talk, I will present EEG and behavioural evidence on how adult and children process word order and case marking cues in Basque, with a particular focus on Basque-French bilingual children. I will also discuss the influence of language exposure and prosody for the acquisition of morphosyntactic cues, and I will argue that bilingual children transfer sentence processing strategies between their languages.

Political language is a prime case of non-cooperative language use, violating Gricean principles of communication. In this talk, I discuss how plausible deniability is a key mechanisms in politician’s use of language. For the hearer, this bears the problem that they need to uncover potential strategic intentions. For communication to remain advantageous despite the risk of misinformation, hearers need to vigilant towards the trustworthiness of the source and content (Sperber et al., 2010). In a series of studies, I show that hearers award a stance of trust when their political views align with the candidate and thus implicated content is understood better (Gotzner, 2026). This points to an unsettling fact: Our political identities can shape what we think was communicated, even when the words are the same. Further, I will show that basic sentence compehension was similar across voter groups but beliefs affected how quickly implicated content was being endorsed (Gotzner, Hoeks & Hovemann, 2026). This suggests that hearers may engage in less deliberate processing when trust towards the speaker is high. Finally, I investigate how the detection of misinformation is modulated by cognitive, social and political factors. The experiments show that mistrust towards the government, underinformative and polarizing statements increase the likelihood that misinformation is being accepted as true. My main conclusion is that polarization of opinions can start at the level of language understanding, before we start debating facts. Since politicians use language to pursue their own strategic goals, hearers need to be vigilant for misinformation.

In recent years, long-standing questions about the nature of language and linguistic practice have returned to the forefront of intellectual debates, often in response to the consequences of contemporary forms of language contact—from language shift and endangerment to the (super-)diversification of metropoles. There is no shortage of novel concepts and theoretical approaches, be they calls for disinventing or provincializing language(s), proposals to reconceptualize (post-)multilingual practices as (trans-)languaging, or attempts at understanding nonhuman, metahuman, and machine semiosis. A plethora of groundbreaking research inspired by these debates notwithstanding, conceptual innovations also bear certain risks, including that of losing the phenomena they are designed to capture. In this talk, I hope to show what can be learned when we put questions such as "what language is" back into the context of everyday interactions between speakers, privileging their perspectives as they emerge in the unfolding of talk. My particular focus is on children's socialization into different modes of attending to language. I take as a starting point my long-term fieldwork among the Indigenous Aché in eastern Paraguay, a recently settled hunter–gatherer collective experiencing language shift from their heritage language, Aché, to the national language, Guaraní. The currently dominant medium of communication in the communities is a mixed code, learned by children as their first language. At the same time, language activism and debates about endangerment have increased awareness of language and the linguistic ascriptions of heterogeneous resources used in interaction. This context provides a privileged vantage point not only for discussing language emergence and processes of language fusion, but also for analyzing the interplay of metapragmatic discourse, metalinguistic awareness, and linguistic practice. Drawing from phenomenology, conversation analysis, and language socialization research, I will closely examine examples of Aché children's creative manipulation of linguistic resources from different languages in everyday play and educational settings. I will show how language emerges in these interactions as an experiential object and discuss what that tells us about the nature of language.

Iconicity (a resemblance between form and meaning) in sign languages appears to be much more pervasive and structured compared to spoken languages. Currently, however, we know very little about how iconicity might impact the structure of the lexicon or whether iconic signs are processed differently in the brain. My colleagues and I have been exploring the nature of the distribution of iconic forms in the American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon, what drives the iconic depiction of semantic features, and whether iconic signs are perceived and processed differently than non-iconic signs. We have used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to examine whether iconic signs exhibit a distinct “neural signature” for deaf fluent signers or for hearing new learners and whether effects of iconicity are task-dependent. Thus far, this work indicates a) iconic signs have a unique lexical distribution that differs from that of iconic spoken words, b) salient/distinctive semantic features are more likely to be iconically depicted in signs, c) there appears to be no neural signature that tracks with the strength of iconicity during sign recognition for fluent signers, d) the effects of sign iconicity are task-dependent, facilitating picture-naming but not word-to-sign translation, and e) neural effects of iconicity diminish with learning. Overall, the results reveal linguistic consequences for grounding language in the body that shape the structure of the lexicon, but neural effects of iconicity may only occur under certain circumstances.

Language policies in educational institutions are more than just administrative decisions. Rather, they are established and acted out in diverse and sometimes contradictory forms on different levels by a multitude of actors, as this lecture illustrates.

It begins with an overview of language policy as a field, tracing its key dimensions and the relationship between official institutional policy and actual language practice. It then turns to the current state of research on family language policies, providing a brief overview of how families negotiate language use, transmission, and prestige in ways that both respond to and resist institutional pressures.

Empirically, the lecture first builds on findings from previous studies regarding the perspectives on multilingualism held by pedagogical professionals and former students at German schools abroad in different world regions. The lecture then draws on original ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a German international (pre-)school in the United States—a highly multilingual setting in which the negotiation of language policies poses one of the most pressing issues for the various stakeholders within the school community. This issue is analysed by juxtaposing parents’ accounts of their family language policies with participant observations of everyday (pre-)school life and in-situ talks with educational professionals at the school. The findings point to recurring tensions between policy as text and policy as practice, contributing to a broader ethnographic understanding of how language policies are negotiated in multilingual early childhood and school settings.

Hearing learners of a sign language as a second language (L2) are additionally facing a second modality (M2). This L2M2 trajectory provides a unique opportunity to study the acquisition of a phonological system whereby the learner cannot draw from a comparable system in their L1. That is not to say that L2M2 learners are wholly new to the manual modality, as they have motoric and expressive experience through the use of gesture. However, these gestures are not composed of smaller, phonological units which is precisely what learners need to discover and master in signs. In this talk, I will show how the phonological sign components (i.e. parameters) handshape, location and movement play a role throughout the early acquisition of DGS (German Sign Language, Deutsche Gebärdensprache). I consider L2M2 learners’ (i) starting point (gesture) and goal (sign), (ii) production accuracy and (iii) the comprehension of learner productions by Deaf native/proficient signers. The production data show that previously reported lexical effects of gesture and iconicity in sign language acquisition are more nuanced on the parameter level. In the EEG comprehension study, evidence arises of a parameter-independent tolerance for learner errors, and, additionally, distinct processing patterns for each of the parameters. By considering the parameters from multiple angles patterns emerged, which may be explained by the different structural properties of each parameter. The gesture-to-sign trajectory thus allows us to investigate parameters comprehensively, providing new insights into the individual behavior of handshape, location and movement.

Gestures are considered to be part of language and to form a tightly integrated system together with speech. Thus, when engaging in talk, speakers use a combination of speech and gestures to get their messages across. But while speech is mostly obligatory, gestures are not. Rather, during a certain stretch of discourse, there are moments in which gestures are produced and others when they are not. For instance, in the context of a narrative, if speakers want to introduce a new entity into the story, they will necessarily have to mention the entity in speech by using a referring expression denoting it (e.g., ‘there was a cat’). If they do not, the addressee will have no representation of the entity in question. When it comes to gestures on the other hand, this obligatoriness does not apply in the same way. Speakers have the possibility to but do not necessarily always accompany each mention of a discourse entity with a gesture.
Furthermore, languages offer speakers different options for how to refer to discourse entities depending on the informational conditions in which they are mentioned. One of the central factors influencing these options is the accessibility of information in the preceding discourse. Depending on a referent’s accessibility, speakers can, for instance, vary the form of referring expressions (e.g., richer vs. leaner, indefinite vs. definite) and the clausal structures they are embedded in (e.g., more vs. less specialized for referent introduction). Importantly, gestures too can vary along different dimensions for the representation of discourse referents. They vary in terms of when they are produced, where they are produced, how they are produced, and in terms of what information they express (Debreslioska, 2019).

In this talk, I will highlight the role that discourse-pragmatic principles play for the incidence and semantic content of gestures. Specifically, I will focus on how speakers represent discourse referents multimodally (i.e., in speech and gesture) and show that speakers do not only vary how they refer to referents in speech as a function of the discourse context, but that they also vary the production of gestures. The findings of four different studies bring to light the multifunctionality of gestures, suggesting that gestures can have a parallel or complementary function to speech. They also suggest that gestures’ discursive functions may differ across languages. More generally, the studies further our understanding of the close relationship between speech and gestures, and advocate that gestures be considered in linguistic studies on discourse.

In this talk I examine two aspects of pronominal arguments in Philippine languages, their linear ordering and elision (aka pro-drop, null anaphora), with regard to the concept of prominence. The relative order between multiple pronominal clitics in Philippine languages is a battle between phonological, syntactic and person-based factors with each factor affecting the ordering in a predictable manner, as shown below. (Note that in a transitive clause with two pronominal arguments, the agent is in the genitive and the undergoer is in the nominative case.)

(1) a. Case: genitive > nominative
b. PeRson: 1 > 2 > 3
c. Length: 1σ > 2σ > 3σ

Neither person nor length are sufficient to determine a complete ordering as there may be two clitics of the same number syllable or two third person clitics. Languages that make use of person or length in their ordering thus inevitably also make use of case as a ”tie-breaker”, making the phenomena highly amenable to an Optimality Theoretic analysis. We can derive the clitic ordering relations for three languages with rankings below:

(2) a. Tagalog: Length » Case
b. Maranao: PeRson » Case
c. Ilokano: Case » Length/PeRson

In Tagalog, syllable length is the highest ranking constraint but when the two clitics have the same number of syllables genitive will precede nominative. In Maranao, first person will precede second person, which in turn precedes third person, but if both arguments are third person then genitive will again precede nominative. In Ilokano, genitive clitics must always precede nominative ones, and since this derives a complete ordering we do not see the effects of length or person.

While such OT analyses have been proposed (Anderson 2005; Billings 2005; Billings and Kaufman 2004; Kaufman 2010a,b), it is beyond their scope to explain why these factors converge in the way they do. In other words, why should short precede long, genitive precede nominative, and first person precede second person with second preceding third? Here, I explore the idea that these seemingly disparate factors may all stem from processing biases known to influence linear precedence (cf. Riesberg et al. 2019). Specifically, those elements higher on the scales (1) are more rapidly activated in the psycholingustic sense. This approach does not obviate the need to rank competing constraints as in (2) but rather restricts the content of these constraints and provides them with a potential neural basis.

The second topic here is what I will refer to as the Precedence-Obviation Paradox. While the prominence scales in (1) predict clitic ordering across Philippine languages they make completely incorrect predictions for null anaphora. Nominative arguments are more likely to be null in comparison to genitive ones (Himmelmann 1999) while third person arguments are far easier to express as null in comparison to speech act participants. Clearly, the processing biases and psycholinguistic accessibility relevant to precedence must be different from the discourse- accessibility that gives rise to null anaphora, despite both of these often being referred to as “prominence”. I will ask whether both of these phenomena merit being subsumed under a single concept and how they can be disentangled in a predictive manner.

References

• Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. New York: Oxford University.
• Billings, Loren, and Daniel Kaufman. 2004. Towards a typology of Austronesian pronominal clisis. In Proceedings of AFLA 11, ed. Paul Law, volume 34 of ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 15–29. Berlin: Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft.
• Billings, Loren A. 2005. Ordering clitics and postverbal R-expressions in Tagalog: A unified analysis? In Verb first: On the syntax of verb-initial languages, ed. Andrew Carnie, Heidi Harley, and Sheila Ann Dooley, volume 73 of Linguistik Aktuell, 303–339. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1999. The lack of zero anaphora and incipient person marking in Tagalog. Oceanic Linguistics 38:231–269.
• Kaufman, Daniel. 2010a. The grammar of clitics in Maranao. In Piakandatu ami Dr. Howard P. McKaughan, ed. Loren Billings and Nellke Goudswaard, 132–157. Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines and SIL.
• Kaufman, Daniel. 2010b. The morphosyntax of Tagalog clitics: A typological approach. Doctoral Disserta- tion, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
• Riesberg, Sonja, Kurt Malcher, and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2019. How universal is agent-first? evidence from symmetrical voice languages language. Language 95:523–561.