The Ling Lang Lunch covers topics relevant to linguistics and language that are investigated using a wide range of formal and experimental methods. Members of the Brown community can subscribe to the Ling Lang Lunch email list to be informed of upcoming talks.

The talks are open to all members of the Brown community. Dates and abstracts are available on the Ling Lang Lunch page on the Linguistics and Language at Brown website.

Spring 2023

• Gillian Gallagher, New York University:
  (Feb. 1)  /q/

• Neil Myler, Boston University:
  (Feb. 8) One-replacement, binary branching, and micro-comparative synthax

• Laura Janda, University of Tromso:
  (Feb.15)  Is a group one thing or many? Singular vs. plural agreement in Russian and Norwegian 

• Tore Nesset, University of Tromso:
  (Feb. 22) Recycled morphemes from macro- and micro-perspectives

• Annette D'Onofrio, Northwestern University:
  (Mar. 1) TBD

• Jim Wood, Yale University:
  (Mar. 15) TBD

• CLPS Grad Students, Brown University:
  (Apr. 5) TBD

• CLPS Grad Students, Brown University:
  (Apr. 12) TBD

• CLPS Grad Students, Brown University:
  (Apr. 19) TBD

• CLPS Grad Students, Brown University:
  (Apr. 26) TBD

• CLPS Grad Students, Brown University:
  (May. 3) TBD

Fall 2022

• Ben Falandays, Brown University:
  (Sept. 14)  The emergence of cultural attractors: How dynamic populations of learners achieve collective cognitive alignment

• Stefon Flego, Brown University:
  (Sept. 21) Capturing cross-linguistic variation in the phonotactic behavior of consonant-glide-vowel sequences

• Filip Smolik, Univerzita Karlova:
  (Oct. 12) Acquiring grammatical morphology: the early stages 

• Tanya Bondarenko, Harvard University:
  (Oct. 19) Factivity alternations in Azeri: an argument for the structural approach

• Augustina Owusu, Boston College:
  (Oct. 27) Definiteness Across Domain

• Anna Obukhova, University of Toronto:
  (Nov. 2) Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis: How the Russian Media Are Approaching Svalbard (Spitsberge)

• Kathryn Franich, Harvard University:
  (Nov. 9) Cross-Language and Language-Specific Patterns in the Relationship Between Coordination, Phonetic Enhancement, and Prosodic Prominence

• Nandi Sims, Stanford University:
  (Nov. 16) New Dialect Formation: Evidence from a pre-adolescent community

• Ruth Kramer, Georgetown University:
  (Nov. 30) A critical investigation of phonological gender assignment across languages

Spring 2022

• Ailis Cournane, NYU:
  (Mar. 2) Dedicated markers for the hardest thoughts: learning epistemics and counterfactuals the "easy" way

• Youtao Lu, Brown University:
  (Mar. 9) Exhaustive Access of Homophonous Words in Spoken Word Recognition: a Cross-Linguistic Comparison between English and Japanese

• Lorna Quandt, Gallaudet University:
  (Apr. 6) Sign Language and Embodied Cognition: Bringing Together EEG, Behavior, and Emerging Technology

• Jooyoung Lee & Gershon Pevnick, Brown University:
  (Apr. 13) A’ingae multifunctional marker khen and its interaction with quotatives

• Yanwan Zhu & Annika McDermott-Hinman, Brown University:
  (Apr. 27) TBA

• Natalie Weber, Yale University:
  (May 4) Late vocabulary insertion and even later metrification in Blackfoot

• Bruno Ferenc Segedin, Brown University:
  (May 11) Do languages overrepresent words with vowel harmony?

Fall 2021

• Rowena Garcia, Max Planck Institute for Psychololinguistics:
  (Sept. 15) Children's aquisition of a symmetrical voice language: Evidence from Tagalog

• Mieke Slim, Ghent University:
  (Oct. 6) Mental representations of compositional semantic structure: Evidence from priming

• Amalia Skilton, Cornell University:
  (Oct. 20) Learning speaker- and addressee-centered demonstratives in Ticuna

• Tyler Knowlton, University of Pennsylvania:
  (Nov. 17) The psycho-logic of each and every 

• Rachel Dudley, Central European University:
  (Dec. 1) Pragmatic effects in the evaluation of false belief reports

• Guilluame Thomas, University of Toronto:
  (Dec. 8) Switch-reference, discourse coherence and centering

Spring 2021

• Nicole Holliday, UPenn:
  (Jan. 27) Kamala Harris and the Construction of Complex Ethnolinguistic Political Identity

• Yoolim Kim, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History:
  (Feb. 3) Is the mental representation of a bi-scriptal language enriched by multiple orthographic inputs?

• Jed Pizarro-Guevara, UMass Amherst:
  (Feb. 10) Processing (a)symmetries in relative clauses: Tagalog as a case study

• Kathleen Hall, University of British Columbia:
  (Feb. 17) Testing “Message-Oriented” Phonology in the Signed Modality 

• Judith Degen, Stanford:
  (Feb. 24) Towards a unifying computational account of reference production and comprehension

• Meredith Tamminga, UPenn:
  (Mar. 3) Interspeaker covariation in sound changes: A hierarchical clustering approach

• Nikole Giovannone, UConn:
  (Mar. 24) Individual differences in acoustic-phonetic and lexical contributions to speech perception

• Jeremy Kuhn, Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS), Ecole Normale Supérieure:
  (Mar. 31) Negative concord in spoken and sign language

• Lauren Franklin, Brown University:
  (Apr. 7) Toddlers show adult-like sensitivity to consonants and vowels in early word representations

• Youtao Lu, Brown University:
  (Apr. 14) Bear the bare bear: is there a difference between homophones and homonyms in spoken word recognition?

Fall 2020

• Kate Lindsey, Boston University:
  (Sept.16) Deriving the Pahoturi River vowel space using diachronic and synchronic methods 

• Lelia Glass, Georgia Tech:
  (Sept. 23) The lexical and compositional semantics of distributivity

• Shiying Yang, Brown University:
  (Sept. 30) Too Much Information: How the Structure of the Lexicon Avoids Information Overload

• Christina Schonberg, UW Madison:
  (Oct. 7) Language as an agent of cognitive change

• Emily Morgan, UC Davis:
  (Oct. 14) Psycholinguistics of Programming Languages

• Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, UMich Ann Arbor:
  (Oct. 21) Depending on Speaker Identity: Sociophonetic Evidence & EEG Correlates Reflect Linguistic Expectations On Behalf of Speaker & Listener

• Athulya Aravind, MIT:
  (Oct. 28) Presupposition and accommodation in child language 

• Andrés Buxó-Lugo, University of Maryland:
  (Nov. 11) That was a question?: Encoding and decoding meaning through structured variability in intonational speech prosody  

• Misha Oraa Ali, Brown University:
  (Dec. 2) (When) do children learn the distributivity of “each”?

Spring 2019 Speaker Schedule

Past Speakers

2018 Speakers

• Mirjam Fried, Charles University in Prague:
  (Sept. 9) When main clauses go AWOL: a constructional account of polarity shifts in insubordination

• Kyuwon Moon:
  (Oct. 24) TBA

• Scott Seyfarth, Ohio State University:
  (Nov. 7) TBA

• Steven Frankland, Princeton University:
  (Nov. 28)​ TBA

2015-2016

• Robert Henderson, University of Arizona:
  Pluractional ideophones in Tseltal and Upper Necaxa Totonac 

• Eiling Yee, University of Connecticut:
  Putting Concepts in Context

• Matt Barros, Yale University:
  Sluicing and Ellipsis Identity

• Emily Myers, University of Connecticu:
  Non-Native Speech Sound Learning: Studies of Sleep, Brain, and Behavior

• Peter Klecha, University of Connecticut:
  Regulating Loose Talk through Implicature

• Wilson Silva, Rochester Institute of Technoology:
  The Desano Language Documentation Project: Fieldwork, Theory and Language Revitalization

• Polly Jacobson, Brown University:
  You think there's Silent Linguistic Material, but I don't: Neg Raising meets Ellipsis

• Stephen Emet, Brown University:
  "I'm sorry I ever went to that talk:" NPIs in Affective Contexts

• Matthew Hall, University of Connecticut:
  Using Non-Language to Understand Language

2014-2015

• Philip Hofmeister, Brown University:
  Expectations and linguistic acceptability judgments

• Stefanie Tellex, Brown University:
  Natural Language and Robotics

• Scott AnderBois, Brown University:
  The discourse particle wal in Yucatec Maya: a decompositional approach

• Chigusa Kurumada, University of Rochester:
  Expectation-adaptation in the incremental interpretation of English contrastive prosody

• Sophia Malamud, Brandeis University:
  Utterance modifiers and the emergence of illocutionary force

• Masako Fidler, Brown University:
  Mining reader receptions of text with keyword analysis

• Sara Guediche, Brown University:
  Flexible and adaptive processes in speech perception