Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 6)

Interested in studying abroad at one of our partner universities in 2018-2019?

Here are the important steps:

1. Register your interest in the Study Abroad opportunity by clicking on the link below and filling in the form:

https://lancaster.moveon4.com/form/5a004d2a3f5d66f254f0e684/eng

2. Read these important slides (click: initial Briefing 2018-19 final), provided by the International Office.

3. Attend the appropriate briefing sessions, offered by the International Office.

The schedule is below. For questions regarding the briefings, please email globalexperiences@lancaster.ac.uk.

4. Submit your application before the deadline.

The applications are handled by our colleagues in the International Office. After you submit your application, this will be sent to the Departmetn for review. You should know whether you have been allocated a place in January.

A few more pictures from AMLaP – conference dinner at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe.

Final registration deadline for AMLAP 2017 has been extended until 7th August 2017, but may close earlier if we reach our limit on numbers. Very last few places are still available for the conference dinner.

Registration information is here:

Registration

The provisional programme for AMLAP 2017 is here:

Programme

See elsewhere on the amlap2017 website for more information on travel.

We are afraid that, due to the popularity of the meeting and limits on numbers (and lack of local funding support…!), local people will need to register to attend the conference.

Padraic Monaghan, Patrick Rebuschat, Francesca Citron

Very happy to have received Lancaster University’s Outstanding Contribution Award. The Outstanding Contribution Awards officially recognize “performance and behaviour that is excellent, innovative, and engaging, that transcends normal expectations for a role.” In my case, the award recognizes my work in the area of internationalization.

Great time at the staff award dinner and at the Pendle graduation cerimony, presided by Lancaster University’s Chancellor, The Rt Hon. Alan Milburn.

We are very pleased to announce that Michael Ullman will be visiting Lancaster University to give a talk on language, memory and the brain. Abstract, location and short bio are provided below. This is a unique opportunity for staff and students to engage with a world-leading cognitive neuroscientist, who is particularly renowned for his extensive work on the neural basis of first and second language acquisition and processing. (And for me it’s a great opportunity to catch up with Michael, a former colleague from my three years at Georgetown University.)

The event is co-organized by Linguistics and Psychology. Please contact Padraic Monaghan p.monaghan@lancaster.ac.uk, or myself,  p.rebuschat@lancaster.ac.uk, for more information on Michael’s schedule, or if you’d like to join us for lunch.

Professor Michael T. Ullman
Departments of Neuroscience, Linguistics, Psychology and Neurology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

11am Monday 24th July 2017
C89 County South, Lancaster University

Language, memory, and brain: Learning and memory brain systems in first and second language

Increasing evidence suggests that language learning, knowledge, and use crucially depend on two learning and memory systems in the brain: declarative memory and procedural memory. These systems, which also exist in other vertebrate species, appear to have been co-opted for language – whether or not they subsequently became further specialized for this domain, either evolutionarily or developmentally.

Because the behavioral, anatomical, physiological, molecular and genetic correlates of these two systems are quite well-studied in animals and humans, they lead to numerous specific predictions about language that would not likely be made in the more circumscribed study of language alone. This approach is thus very powerful in being able to generate a wide range of novel predictions for language – including for first and second language, in various healthy and disordered populations.

In the talk I will first provide some background on the two memory systems, and then discuss the manner in which language is predicted to depend on them. One of the key concepts is that to some extent the two systems can underlie the same functions (e.g., for navigation, grammar, etc.), and thus they play at least partly redundant roles for these functions. This has important consequences for first and second language, as well as for language disorders.

Following the background, I will present multidisciplinary evidence (behavioral, neurological, neuroimaging, electrophysiological) that basic aspects of language do indeed depend on the two memory systems, though in somewhat different ways across different populations. I will discuss normal first and second language, individual and group differences (e.g., sex differences), and language in disorders, focusing on neurodevelopmental disorders, especially Specific Language Impairment.

Ullman Bio:
Dr. Ullman is Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Neurology, Linguistics and Psychology. He is Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory and the Georgetown EEG/ERP Lab. His research examines the brain bases of first and second language, how language and memory are affected in various disorders (e.g., autism, dyslexia, Specific Language Impairment, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases), and how factors such as sex, handedness, and genetic variability affect the brain bases of language and memory.

Just uploaded a manuscript we recently submitted for review. Please access by clicking link below- comments and suggestions welcome!

Grey, S., Schoetensack, C., Bell, K., Monaghan, P., & Rebuschat, P. (under review). Individual differences in implicit and explicit language learning: Working memory, learning styles, and personality.

Having fun setting up our new statistical learning – EEG  💡 experiment with Aina Casaponsa and Padraic Monaghan. We look forward to testing subjects soon, together with our two SPRINT interns Abigail Dutton and Pavlina Kutsarova. Thanks to the SPRINT scheme and to the FASS Research Fund 2017-2018 for making this great project possible.

Happy to announce that our special issue of Language Learning on “Experimental, computational, and corpus-based approaches to language learning” is out today, co-edited with Tony McEnery and Detmar Meurers. You can access the special issue here.

Many thanks to our authors for their excellent contributions and to our peer reviewers, who provided very valuable feedback, especially on how to make the contributions accessible and relevant across disciplines.

Our editors’ introduction is available online (open access), please click here to read the introduction.

Summary:

Language acquisition occupies a central place in the study of human cognition, and research on how we learn language can be found across many disciplines, from developmental psychology and linguistics to education, philosophy and neuroscience. The investigation of a complex phenomenon like language acquisition naturally requires insights, tools, and methods from many disciplines, yet it is still relatively rare to find studies that combine multiple approaches. This volume brings together leading researchers in cognitive psychology, corpus research, developmental psychology, linguistics, and natural language processing to discuss opportunities and challenges of combining multiple approaches to language learning. The peer-reviewed chapters in this volume are written in an accessible and engaging fashion. Together, they provide the reader with a panorama of the exciting research currently being conducted at the intersection of experimental, computational and corpus-based approaches to language learning.

“This issue contains insightful state-of-the-art reviews and offers a great overview of the issues learner corpus and SLA research are facing, an absolute must-read for everyone in these and neighboring fields.” —Stefan Th. Gries, University of California, Santa Barbara

“A timely contribution on the roles that experimental, corpus-based and computational approaches play in our understanding of language learning, bringing together both conceptual overviews and empirical evidence.” —Florence Myles, University of Essex

The program of the second symposium of the Lancaster-Ghent partnership is now online!

The workshop is taking place on April 18-19, 2017, in Ghent. The topic is “Multilingualism: Language learning and testing”. Day 1 will feature talks by Lancaster and Ghent colleagues, Day 2 consists of a workshop on corpus linguistics. The Lancaster delegation will consist of Vaclav Brezina, Tineke Brunfaut, Aina Casaponsa, Dana Gablasova, Luke Harding, and Diane Potts. The local organizer is Piet van Avermaet (piet.vanavermaet@ugent.be).

For more information on the Lancaster-Ghent initiative, please visit our Lancaster-Ghent website or send me an email.

Insightful article by Ricardo Garcia in Expresso on the spike in applications from Portuguese students to study in the UK. Applications have increased by 17% while EU numbers have declined. In a short interview, I mentioned that this increase might be due to (i) increased visibility of UK universities because of widely-reported initiatives undertaken by PARSUK; (ii) excellent reputation of UK universities and strong presence in HEI rankings; (iii) many UK universities guaranteeing Home fees for EU students for the time being; (iv) dominance of English as lingua franca and language of science. (Previous generations of Portuguese students were particularly strong in French, so studying in France might have been more appealing in the past.)

Click here to read the article (in Portuguese).

Here goes a graph from the article that shows the latest UCAS figures by EU country: