News Archive

Zhang, Ruofan is a new PhD student at the HULC lab. She was awarded a 4-year CSC-stipend. Here is a description of her project with the title "Grammatical gender sensitivity and biological gender errors in processing German personal and possessive pronouns"

The HULC lab organizes an international summer school for young researchers from South/Latin America, Asia, and Europe (October 3rd to October 13th). The topic of the school is "Complex structures in Language and Cognition". The summer school is a cooperation of the HULC lab, "Cognitive Science in HD" (Heidelberg University, Field of Focus 4, Main Research Area), the Neurology Department of Heidelberg University Hospital (Section Biomagnetism) and the Core facility for Neuroscience of self-regulation (CNSR).

More information can be found here: https://www.idf.uni-heidelberg.de/personal/gerwien/international-summer-school-2022.html

We are happy to announce that three projects in which HULC lab partake were accepted for presentation at this year's Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference in York, U.K. (Conference website)

A comparison of relative clause production between Chinese and German children (Lili Ji & Johannes Gerwien)

Does information availability affect order of mention and structure choice? (Johannes Gerwien, Judith Schlenter, Martina Penke, Agniezska Konopka)

Noun imageability and different sensory modalities (Maroš Filip, Johannes Gerwien, Filip Smolik)

Ines Marberg and Johannes Gerwien will be presenting work at the symposium "Cognition in the Context of Language and Culture: Processing and Representing Linguistic Information".

Conference website: https://teap2022.uni-koeln.de/home

Conference website: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/public/2562/program

Hier gibt es alle Infos: https://www.hulclab.eu/events/

We are glad about a newly funded project on the readability and intelligibility of texts used in professional education (PIs: Sandra Pappert, Heidelberg, and Alexis Feldmeier García, Münster) and welcome Carolina Olszycka as a new lab member.
https://www.idf.uni-heidelberg.de/pro-sprachwissenschaft/einfach-alpha-geringe-literalitaet-beachten-sprachliche-huerden-abbauen.html
 

Please consider supporting our and our colleagues research by registering here to join the joint participant database ("Studienportal")

In the series of six lectures, “Current trends in multilingualism research”, researchers will present linguistic, cognitive, affective and educational aspects of multilingualism. International experts will discuss the findings of empirical research on individual multilingualism. Specialists will explain the mechanisms which underlie the functioning of multilingual adults and children. Also, they will discuss individual differences in the acquisition of new languages, expressing emotions in foreign languages, multilingualism in education, as well as linguistic and cognitive development of multilingual children.

The lectures are organised by the University of Warsaw School for International Science, in collaboration with the International Association of Multilingualism under the Initiative of Excellence – Research University project (IDUB Action II 3.7 “Multilingualism”), coordinated by Prof. Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic from the UW Faculty of Modern Languages.

More information: https://en.uw.edu.pl/six-lectures-on-multilingualism/

Two projects by members of the HULC lab will be presented at the Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2021 conference. More information about the conference here.

Funding received for a multidisciplinary summer school with the title "Complex structures in language and cognition". More info on application, dates, and specific topics to be covered coming soon. 

Link to OSF: https://osf.io/cg7dj/

Link to CUNY website: https://blogs.umass.edu/cuny2020/

The next Open Lab Day is scheduled for January 23th, 16:00 - 18:00.

The program can be found here.

The European Network for Psycholinguistic Research on Multilingualism and Multilingual Development won first place for their grant proposal to organize a summer school in June 2020 in Warsaw (https://zip.uw.edu.pl/szkoly-letnie-dla-doktorantow-wyniki-konkursu). More information coming soon.

On 23 Oct Adriana Cruz Rubio defended her dissertation on "Processing Patterns of Focusing. An experimental study on pragmatic scales triggered by the Spanish focus operator 'incluso'". Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda (IÜD) and Prof. Dr. José Portolés (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) acted as examiners and Prof. Dr. Francisco Moreno-Fernández was chairman. The doctoral candidate's performance was rated summa cum laude.

On 4 Oct Inés Recio Fernández defended her dissertation on "The impact of procedural meaning on second language processing: a study on connectives". Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda (IÜD) and Prof. Dr. Ted Sanders (Utrecht University, Netherlands) acted as examiners and Prof. Dr. Vahram Atayan was chairman. The doctoral candidate's performance was rated summa cum laude.

The HULC lab is a partner of the European Network for Psycholinguistic Research on Multilingualism and Multilingual Development (4EU+ N-PROM), established as part of the 4EU+ alliance. Find out more about the network and its aims here.

The next HULC Lab Summer Symposium is scheduled for July, 11th.

The program can be found here.

International Summer School "Empirical Approaches to Discourse Studies"
July 26th to August 1st, 2019
University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica

The Center for Iberoamerica (IAZ) at Heidelberg University and the Postgraduate Program in Linguistics of the University of Costa Rica call for applications for the International Summer School "Empirical Approaches to Discourse Studies" (EmpDis 2019). This initiative, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), is one of a series of scientific activities carried out within the international academic cooperation network on discourse studies to which both universities belong.

Information on the workshop and a preliminary program can be found here.

Second International Workshop “Discourse, Multimodality and Experimental Methods” to be held in Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile on November 6 – 9, 2018.

The event will be organized around a series of lectures and practical workshops offered by renown and experienced researchers in the following areas:

a.    Multimodality
b.    Discourse Markers
c.    Discourse Processing Models
d.    First and Second Language Acquisition
e.    Experiment Design and Statistics

All workshops and lectures will be offered in English.

For more detailed information, see the workshop's homepage.

Call for Posters for the 2nd international Workshop Discourse, Multimodality and Experimental Methods. Proposals for posters should be related to the following topics:

• Multimodality
• Discourse Markers
• Discourse Processing Models
• First & Second Language Acquisition
• Experiment Design and Statistics

The Workshop takes place from 6 to 9 November, 2018 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). Find more information on the Workshop's website.

Martha Rudka and Adriana Cruz present their work on focus operators at the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium. 

More information on the conference: here.

The HULC Lab Summer Symposium takes place on June 14th!

A preliminary program is now online.

The abstract for the talk can be found here.

More information on the conference can be found here.

PhD candidate Xiaogang Wu will present a poster entitled "A priority list of factors for syntactic encoding (in German)" at the 31st CUNY sentence processing conference, which will be held on Mar. 15-17, 2018 at UC Davis, Calofornia, USA.

Thank you everybody! We had a great afternoon/evening! For those who missed it, see you next time!

Here is the link to the project website

Here is the link to the project website

more information on the workshop at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics can be found here

Alex Gubina & Johannes Gerwien will present work on bilingual grammatical gender processing. Here is the link to the project website

HULC lab members and members of the research group "Discourse Particles and Cognition" are currently in Chile at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso within the framework of the international project "Discourse, Cognition and Linguistic Markers: Empirical Studies of Text Processing with Eye Tracking", funded by the Chilean Association of Scientific and Technological Research CONICYT.

Two HULC lab projects will be presented at the Linguistic Diversity Meets The Brain: Future directions in the language sciences workshop at the University of Zurich. Here is the abstract of the project "Predicting referents based on structural meaning – The case of the Mandarin Chinese bǎ-construction"

The new website is built on processwire and is not yet fully filled with content. Updates coming soon...

Two HULC lab projects have made it to this year's CUNY at the MIT!

• Project 1: Predicting object states in Mandarin Chinese - insights from the ba-construction (Gerwien/Xi)
• Project 2: Processing discourse referents in Mandarin active and passive SOV sentences (Wang/Gerwien)

The NAR is unique in Germany because of its integrated, systematic approach to aging research, and its interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity in the breadth and depth of aging research requires new ways of knowledge transfer which ensure a connection between different fields of research, but also between theory and practice (https://www.nar.uni-heidelberg.de/en/index.html).

The position will be integrated into a greater project funded by the Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung (Erforschung der Bedeutung der Lebensumstände (körperliche Aktivität, Zweisprachigkeit) - unter Einsatz neuer Technologien – zur Optimierung von Lebensqualität und Reduzierung von Einschränkungen im Alter). The research group will encompass six PhD projects.

We are looking for a candidate who is interested in doing experimental research on the interface of language, psychology and biology. Specifically, the PhD project should focus on the question in how far linguistic and other cognitive processes are proportionally or disproportionally affected by age-related cognitive-decline.

The successful applicant will hold a Master’s degree in Psychology or (Psycho)linguistics. Specific experience in experimental methodology (eye tracking, EEG) and knowledge of statistics is required. English can be used as the working language, but knowledge of German is necessary to communicate with patients and to analyse verbal data.

The successful applicant will be enrolled in the Department of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg.

The stipend is € 1500,- per month for a period of 3 years. In addition € 1500,- per year are granted for travelling.

The application deadline is December 10, 2016.

Any inquiries concerning the position should be directed to: Christiane v. Stutterheim, Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie, Plöck 55, D 69117 Heidelberg, stutterheim@idf.uni-heidelberg.de

Johannes Gerwien and Monique Flecken will present their work on event apprehension at this year's AnnualMeeting of the Cognitive Science Society to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wednesday, August 10 - Saturday August 13, 2016.

HULC lab members will be presenting current projects and recent accomplishments on Thursday July 14th, 16:00 at the Institute for German as a Foreign Language Philology. All visitors welcome!

Johannes Gerwien presented joined work with Martha Rudka at the Attentive Listener 3 workshop, 10–11 March 2016, Potsdam, Germany. The title of the poster is: Using the visual world paradigm to study the online processing of the German scalar focus particle “sogar”. Poster

Johannes Gerwien presented joined work with Christiane von Stutterheim at the Pre-CUNY workshop: Events in Language and Cognition - 2016, Gainesville, Florida, March 2nd, 2016. The talk's title was: Grammatical constraints on event packaging and potential effects on the segmentation of the perceptual stream: Motion events in language and cognition under a cross linguistic perspective.

Conference website: https://sites.google.com/site/eventslangcog2016/home

The 14th International Pragmatics Conference will be held in Antwerp, Belgium, 26-31 July 2015. HULC lab's DPKog-Group is organizing a panel at this conference: "Discourse Markers and Experimental Pragmatics."

Conference website: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE14&n=1476

Talks in this panel:

Ted Sanders, Causality and Subjectivity in discourse and cognition

Marta Andersson, A corpus and experimental investigation of Result coherence relations markers

Inés Recio Fernández, The behaviour of Spanish argumentative connectives: An experimental study on "sin embargo" and "por tanto"

Ira Noveck, How a unified view of pragmatic processing can help discern challenging cases

Adriana Cruz Rubio & Martha Rudka, Processing of informative / contrastive focus in Spanish: experimental notes about the Spanish and German focus particles incluso and sogar

Martha Rudka & Johannes Gerwien, The focus sensitive element sogar – Does the procedural
meaning of sogar help speakers to accelerate the comprehension of a semantic scale?

The Centre for Ibero-American Studies at Heidelberg University (IAZ) invites researchers on discourse markers in Romance languages to take part in the 4th International Symposium “Discourse Markers in Romance Languages: A Contrastive Approach”, which will be held from May 6 to 9, 2015 in Heidelberg (Germany).

The Heidelberg Symposium is one of a series of conferences on discourse markers in Romance languages (Madrid, 2010; Buenos Aires, 2011; Campinas, 2012) and aims to build on the previous events. With its contrastive focus, the symposium serves as a platform for internationally renowned linguists, and particularly for young researchers, to exchange views and ideas and broaden their research perspectives.

With special reference to discourse particle research, the conference will be an opportunity to look at the findings provided so far by contrastive linguistics and related disciplines. Plenary lectures will take a more general approach to the topic while specialized presentations are planned to be given in the following five theme sessions:

• Contrastive Linguistics and Discourse Markers: Contrastive semasiology and onomasiology of discourse markers in Romance languages and their varieties
• Translation Studies and Discourse Markers: Translation problems and challenges posed by discourse markers
• Contrastive Lexicography and Discourse Markers: Problems and challenges of theoretical metalexicography or contributions on historical (contrastive) lexicography
• Contrastive Diachronic Linguistics and Discourse Markers: Diachronic research on discourse markers, including a contrastive approach to one or several discourse markers in one or more Romance languages
• Discourse Markers and Language Acquisition: Research on L1 or L2 reception and production of discourse markers in Romance languages

Conference website: http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/fakultaeten/neuphil/iask/sued/iaz/mdrl/index_en.html

CHRONOS is a series of conferences dedicated to current research on the morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of markers of tense, aspect, actionality, and modality/evidentiality. This year there will be a workshop called "Psycholinguistic insights into the conceptual processes underlying the use of grammatical aspect" ...

... organized by the HULC lab researchers Christiane von Stutterheim, Monique Flecken, and Mary Carroll.

Link to the conference web page: http://linguistica.sns.it/Chronos11/home.htm

Seit 2012 gibt es das IAZ-Santander Universitäten-Stipendienprogramm mit drei Förderlinien, das für Doktoranden und Nachwuchswissenschaftler der Sprach-, der Übersetzungs- und der Literaturwissenschaft entworfen wurde, denen die Möglichkeit eines mehrmonatigen Forschungsaufenthalts an einer Universität im Ausland gegeben wird.

Hinter dem Gründungsgedanken des Iberoamerika-Zentrums steht das Vorhaben, die Forschungskontakte zwischen Deutschland und den Ländern der iberischen Halbinsel und Lateinamerikas zu stärken und insbesondere den Aufbau von Netzwerken für Nachwuchswissenschaftler aus den Geisteswissenschaften zu unterstützen.

Informationen gibt es auf folgender Website: http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/fakultaeten/neuphil/iask/sued/iaz/stipendien.html

Vom 11. bis 13. Dezember 2013 veranstalteten das Iberoamerika-Zentrum und das Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen der Universität Heidelberg gemeinsam mit der Università degli Studi di Milano die Workshopreihe „Fachsprachlicher Diskurs und Diskursmarkierung in den romanischen Sprachen“.

An der Veranstaltung, die an der Università degli Studi di Milano und im Rahmen der DAAD-Initiative „Hochschuldialog mit Südeuropa" stattgefunden hat, nahmen junge und renommierte Wissenschaftler aus Italien, Spanien und Deutschland teil.

Das HULC lab war an der Workshopreihe durch Vorträge mehrerer Mitglieder in der Sektion „Neue Wege der Partikelforschung" ebenfalls vertreten:

- Prof. Rainer Dietrich, „The Meaning of Modal Particles. A Case for the One-Word-One-Meaning-Postulate

- Johannes Gerwien, „How to get into people’s heads. Investigating conceptual and structural features of grammatical aspect by using three different psycholinguistic methods"

- Lisa Keil/Laura Nadal, „La marcación del foco en español mediante las partículas discursivas incluso / también: un estudio experimental"

- Adriana Cruz/Inés Recio, „The Focus Particle incluso: An Experimental Approach to Marked and Unmarked Focus Processing in Spanish"

Weitere Informationen finden Sie hier

Mit dem 11. Internationalen Kongress über Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Congreso Internacional de Lingüística General CILG) wird eine bewährte Konferenzreihe fortgeführt, die seit 1994 im Zweijahrestakt an spanischen Universitäten organisiert wird und die ein wissenschaftliches Dialog- und Austauschforum über Sprache und Sprachen darstellt.

Auf dem Kongress ist eine Sektion zum Thema „Aktuelle Fragestellungen der experimentellen Linguistik: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen” vorgesehen, die von der Forschungsgruppe Diskurspartikeln und Kognition der Universität Heidelberg organisiert wird. Ziel ist es, einen Raum für die Debatte über die theoretischen und epistemologischen Grundlagen der empirischen Sprachwissenschaft sowie die in den letzten Jahren erzielten Ergebnisse über die kognitiven Verstehens- und Produktionsprozesse zu schaffen.

www.unav.es/congreso/xicilg

Information über das Zusenden von Themenvorschlägen:

http://www.unav.edu/congreso/xicilg/abstracts

Kontakt:

Laura.Nadal@iued.uni-heidelberg.de

The international Workshop "Discourse Particles and Information Processing in Romance Languages" will take place at Seminar für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen, July, 11th-12th 2012. For detailed information, please follow this Link: http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/fakultaeten/neuphil/iask/sued/iaz/congresomd.html.