Tag: Lisbon (Page 1 of 2)

HLAW 2022: Thank you, Lisbon, and see you in Amherst!

June 6, 2022 / Sophie Bennett

HLAW organizers and keynotes. From left to right: Professor Peter Austin (SOAS), Professor Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (Hamburg), Professor Jason Rothman (Tromsø), Professor Ana Lúcia Santos (HL2C, Lisbon), Professor Naomi Nagy (Toronto), Professor Cristina Flores (HL2C, Lisbon), Professor Luiz Amaral (HL2C, Amherst).

The Heritage Languages Around the World (HLAW) conference took place between May 18-20, 2022, at the University of Lisbon, one of the HL2C founding institutions. The meeting was originally scheduled to take place in 2020 but had to be postponed due to the pandemic. But it was well worth the wait! HLAW 2022 was a joyful and uniting event that brought together leading scientists and students from linguistics, psychology and education to share novel research in the domain of heritage language research.

Many congratulations to the organizers, Ana Lúcia Santos, Cristina Flores, Hugo Cardoso and Luiz Amaral, for a wonderful event, and thank you to the Centro de Linguística (CLUL, The University of Lisbon), Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (CEHUM, The University of Minho), the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Camões Institute, for supporting this important event.

The conference remains a regular event of the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), and we already look forward to the next edition of HLAW, to take place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in June 2024!

The participants of HLAW 2022. Thank you to the organizers, keynotes and all those who attended to make this a special event. See you in Amherst for HLAW 2024!

HL2C Seminar: João Veríssimo (Lisbon), L2 morphological processing reveals the internal differentiation of the language system

June 1, 2022 / Sophie Bennett

We are pleased to announce the next HL2C/SLLAT seminar, taking place on Thursday 9^th June 2022, from 3pm to 4pm (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenters:

João Veríssimo (University of Lisbon)

Title:

L2 morphological processing reveals the internal differentiation of the language system

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

Two broad perspectives have been advanced to account for observed differences between L1 and L2 speakers in attainment and processing. In one view, such differences are fundamental and possibly selective, with particular parts of the language system becoming hard or impossible for late learners to acquire in a native-like way – likely due to maturation. In another view, L1-L2 contrasts can be attributed to general factors, such as slower processing speed or amount of exposure, and are expected to be more gradient in nature, as well as more general in scope. In this talk, I will present results from experiments and meta-analyses examining the L2 processing of morphology, as a test case for these larger perspectives.

Our results indicate that differences between L1 and L2 speakers show remarkable selectivity and are restricted to specific parts of the morphological processing system (e.g., inflection, conjugation clases); in contrast, other sub-domains of morphology (e.g., word formation) can be processed in a native-like way, even when the L2 was acquired later in life. At the same time, the observed L1-L2 differences were often found to be gradient rather than all-or-none, for example, becoming more pronounced at later ages of acquisition. This suggests that a full account of L2 processing may require models that can accommodate gradient levels of nonnative-likeness and morphological constituency, while nevertheless respecting the internal differentiation of the language system.

International Conference on Heritage Languages Around the World in two weeks!

May 4, 2022 / Sophie Bennett

Only two weeks remain until the International Conference on Heritage Languages Around the World (HLAW), an exciting event taking place in person which brings together various research perspectives on heritage languages in order to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of language development and education in immigrant and minority language communities around the world.

Dates and location: 18^th to 20^th May 2022, University of Lisbon.

Organisers: HL2C members Ana Lúcia Santos (Lisbon), Cristina Flores (Minho), Luiz Amaral (UMass Amherst) and Hugo Cardoso (Lisbon) and by their respective institutions, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho, the Portuguese Program and the Heritage Language Research Group at UMass Amherst.

Programme: The programme is available here. The four keynote speakers are as follows

Peter Austin (University of London)
Issues and challenges in language endangerment and heritage languages: some Australian examples
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (University of Hamburg)
At the interface of heritage language learning and teacher education: motorways, short-cuts and no-go areas
Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto)
Promoting linguistic and cultural diversity through Heritage Language Sociolinguistics
Jason Rothman (University of Tromso)
Theoretical Epistemology and Methodology in Heritage Language Bilingualism

How to register: To register, please consider the payment information available on the website and fill in the form available here.

For more information, please see the HLAW website or contact heritage.languages.conference@gmail.com.

Registration open: Lisbon Summer School in Linguistics 2022

March 25, 2022 / Patrick Rebuschat

Registration for the Lisbon Summer School in Linguistics 2022 is now open! Enrolment is open until June 20, 2022.

This year’s edition includes courses on bilingual development, L2 speech learning, and L2 morphological processing, which will be of interest to many of you.

Dates and location: July 4-8, 2022, School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon (website)

Organizers: The Summer School is co-organized by NOVA’s Linguistics Research Centre (CLUNL) with the support of Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), ELEXIS, NexusLinguarum and Prêt à LLOD.

Program: There are nine courses offered. The program is available here. You can also check the abstracts of each course per area:

Area 1: Formal and Experimental Linguistics (PDF)
Area 2: Terminology and Lexicography (PDF)
Area 3: Grammar & Text (PDF)

How to enroll: To enroll, please consider the payment information available here and fill in the form available here.

Audience: PhD students are the main target audience, but the summer school is open to post-docs and more senior researchers, too.

For more information, please visit the Lisbon Summer School website.

HL2C YouTube Channel now online!

March 11, 2022 / Patrick Rebuschat

HL2C YouTube Channel now online

It is a pleasure to announce that the HL2C YouTube Channel is now up and running. We are using this channel to share video content of activities involving the Consortium and its constituent partner institutions.

You can access our channel by clicking this link.

We grateful to the speakers of our HL2C Seminar Series for their stimulating talks and for agreeing to share the recordings with the wider heritage language and second language community. Thank you also to Luiz Amaral, who suggested the creation of this channel, and to Sophie Bennett for editing the videos and co-managing the channel.

We hope you enjoy the YouTube Channel!

Congratulations to HL2C Vice Director Cristina Flores: Habilitation (agregação)

February 25, 2022 / Patrick Rebuschat

Congratulations to HL2C Vice Director Professor Cristina Flores for successfully concluding her Portuguese Habilitation (agregação) examination earlier this week. The Habilitation is the highest university degree in European countries such as Germany and Portugal, requiring excellence in research, teaching, and academic leadership.

The public examination took place on February 21 and 22, with a panel consisting of Professor Isabel Ermida (Chair, Minho), Professor Anabela Gonçalves (Lisbon), Professor Georg Kaiser (Konstanz), Professor Jürgen Meisel (Hamburg), Professor Patrick Rebuschat (Lancaster University), and Professor Augusto Soares da Silva (Católica). The panel commended Cristina for her outstanding track-record in research, teaching and service and approved the candidate unanimously.

Standing, from left to right: Professor Anabela Gonçalves (Lisbon), Professor Cristina Flores (Minho), Professor Isabel Ermida (Minho), and Professor Augusto Soares da Silva (Católica). Participating via Zoom, on screen, from left to right: Professor Patrick Rebuschat (Lancaster University), Professor Jürgen Meisel (Hamburg), and Professor Georg Kaiser (Konstanz).

PhD scholarship: Natural Language Processing and SLA

January 26, 2022 / Patrick Rebuschat

We are delighted to announce the a three-year PhD position, co-supervised by Professor Amália Mendes (University of Lisbon), Professor Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen), and Professor Patrick Rebuschat (Lancaster University). It would be great if you could circulate the announcement within your networks.

PhD scholarship: Natural Language Processing and Second Language Acquisition

Applications are invited for a three-year PhD position in Natural Language Processing applied to foreign language learning and teaching at the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon (CLUL).

The deadline for applications is February 28, 2022. For additional information, including salary and application details, please visit:

https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/733640

The aim of the PhD project is to research, develop and evaluate a digital tool supporting the acquisition of Portuguese as a Foreign or Heritage language. The work can build on the existing ICALL approaches developed at the University of Tübingen for English and German (http://icall-research.de). The goal is to support learners in selecting texts that support noticing of key target structures and provide practice opportunities. The computational linguistic analysis can build on recent findings about linguistic structures that are acquired late by heritage speakers of Portuguese and include an empirical validation in the context of the network maintained by the Camões Institute across the globe.

The PhD project will be co-supervised by Professor Amália Mendes (University of Lisbon), Professor Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen), and Professor Patrick Rebuschat (Lancaster University). The successful applicant will be integrated in the Heritage Language Consortium (HL2C), a strategic partnership between six European universities and the Camões Institute, a branch of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Further details on the HL2C can be found on our website:

http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/heritage-language/.

For questions, email us at:
Amália Mendes amaliamendes@letras.ulisboa.pt
Detmar Meurers detmar.meuers@uni-tuebingen.de
Patrick Rebuschat p.rebuschat@lancaster.ac.uk

LX Proficiency: New automatic proficiency classifier launched

December 4, 2021 / Patrick Rebuschat

The Camões Institute and the University of Lisbon have recently launched a new version of the LX Proficiency classifier, a computational tool that supports the classification of Portuguese texts on the scale of proficiency levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

The LX Proficiency classifier was first developed in 2013 as part of a cooperation agreement between the Camões Institute and the University of Lisbon’s Speech and Natural Language Processing Group (NLX), which is directed by Professor António Branco.

The classifier automatically determines the level of difficulty and readability of texts written in Portuguese, based on the CEFR levels. It can be used, for example, to aid teachers in the selection of texts for heritage or foreign language classes or to support the creation of more reliable items for Portuguese proficiency exams. This revised and improved version is based on a greater language corpus and more advanced computation tools.

This important resource is free to use and can be accessed at the PORTULAN CLARIN website, a repository for research infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language. Please visit the following page to use LX Proficiency.

Enrolment opens for free Armenian language and culture courses

December 2, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

avc website banner eng 1

Earlier this academic year, the University of Lisbon, one of the HL2C founding institutions, established a new cooperation agreement with the Armenian Virtual College, Yerevan State University, and the Portugal-Armenia Friendship Association.

As a result, we are pleased to announce an exciting opportunity for those interested in learning a new language. The Armenian Virtual College (AGBU) invites anyone interested in Armenian language and culture to enrol in various free online courses, from 3rd until 19th December 2021. The language courses start from 10th January until 15th March 2022 and provide the opportunity for students to enrich their knowledge of Eastern Armenian, Western Armenian, the history of Armenia, Armenian architecture, Armenian music and chess. More information about the courses can be found here.

The courses stem from a set of initiatives laid out in the cooperation agreement; they aim to strengthen the links between the various educational institutions and to promote Armenian language and culture in Portugal and Portuguese language and culture in Armenia.

For more information, please visit the original news source (University of Lisbon).

Science Awards: Congratulations to Ana Lúcia Santos

November 30, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

Congratulations to Professor Ana Lúcia Santos for winning the University of Lisbon – Caixa Geral de Depósitos Science Award 2020 in the Language Sciences category. Ana Lúcia is a specialist in language acquisition research and a member of HL2C Steering Committee.

The awards recognise scientific excellence across a wide range of fields and serve to promote dissemination of cutting-edge research in international academic journals.

Nominations for the 2021 edition of this prestigious award have recently been opened. Nominations will close on 15th December at 17:00 (Lisbon time). Further information about the award can be found on the University of Lisbon’s website.

Scientific Awards University of Lisbon/Caixa Geral de Depósitos | Applications open until December 15

News