Lecturers and Talks

Confirmed invited speakers and lecture topics

All times are Moscow time (UTC+3). 

Barbara Höhle, University of Potsdam, Germany

1) Behavioral and neurophysiological approaches to first language acquisition during infancy - June 22, 10:00-11:00 (Part 1) and 11:15-12:15 (Part 2)

The first years of life is a period of fast attunement to fundamental properties of the native language. This lecture will present recent findings on perceptual and cognitive conditions that infants are equipped with to master the task of acquiring a language and how these conditions are shaped by the linguistic input that infants are exposed to. Data from classical behavioural paradigms (e.g., headturn preference procedure, visual fixation) will be discussed as well as findings from neuro-cognitive methods (ERP, fNIRS).

2) From infancy to preschool age: Detecting early predictors of developmental language disorders via a longitudinal approach - June 23, 15:00-16:00

The insight that crucial steps of language acquisition are already observable in very young infants has initiated a broad research interest in the continuity of the trajectory of language development across the years of early childhood. More specifically, research started to explore whether the performance that infants show in typical experiments that investigate early language knowledge or processing can serve as a predictor of later language achievement – a question that only can be answered by longitudinal studies. This lecture will present recent findings from this research but will also discuss methodological aspects and challenges of longitudinal studies.


Claudia Männel, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany / Charité - Universitätsmedizin, Germany

Finding words and rules: Electrophysiological markers of early language acquisition - June 22, 14:00-15:30

Infants take crucial language acquisition steps during their first year of life. In this lecture, I will give an overview of electrophysiological research on how phonological processing nurtures infants’ acquisition of their native-language lexicon and syntax. Phonological parameters, such as rhythm and intonation, mark words and word groups in the speech input; moreover, phonological markers characterize morpho-syntactic relations between subjects, verbs, and objects. I will first outline a series of electrophysiological experiments investigating when during development infants start segmenting words from the speech input and mapping these words onto referents – with prosodic information as promoting speech cue. Second, I will present a series of electrophysiological studies on infants’ processing of phonologically-coded input relations that mark morpho-syntactic relations in their native language.


Sophia Malamud, Brandeis University, United States

1) Corpus approaches to first-language acquisition - June 23, 16:15-17:45

This lecture provides a general introduction to corpus research in language acquisition. Corpus methods allow reliable data collection and replicable data analysis. We will start with an overview of corpus use in the history of first language acquisition research. We will introduce the Bilingual Child and Child-directed Russian Speech (BiRCh) Corpus. We then move to the methodology for using existing corpora (with the BiRCh and Russian National Corpus (НКРЯ) as examples) to study various aspects of language use and acquisition: using plain-text corpora to study lexical properties of speech (fillers); using part-of-speech and morphologically annotated corpora to investigate Russian polite requests (Mozhno pozhalujsta with and without verbs). I will then provide a brief introduction to corpus construction to study language varieties for which no pre-existing corpora (or no suitable ones) are available.

2) Practical introduction to corpus analysis: First-language acquisition of English and Russian (together with Dr. Irina Sekerina) - June 24, 17:00-19:00

In this tutorial for beginners, we will provide hands-on steps for using CHILDES, CHILDES-compatible corpora, and BiRCh corpora. We will illustrate how English L1 corpora (Adam from the Brown corpus) and Russian L1 acquisition (Gagarina's corpus and Jenna corpus; BiRCh) can be used to investigate the development of wh-questions (in English) and early noun bias, double-object constructions, and word order in Russian.

Irina Sekerina, College of Staten Island – The City University of New York, United States / National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

1) Introduction to Child Language Data Exchange System - June 23, 18:00-19:30

This lecture is for those who would like to learn general facts about CHILDES (The Child Language Data Exchange System by Brain MacWhinney). CHILDES is a set of tools available on the Internet for the study of L1 acquisition (https://childes.talkbank.org/). I will present some arguments of why L1 acquisition corpora are important and how they can be used in theoretical and empirical research. The examples will illustrate lexical and grammatical development in English and Russian, bilingual acquisition, and child language sample analysis using the CHILDES tools and corpora.

2) Practical introduction to corpus analysis: First-language acquisition of English and Russian (together with Dr. Sophia Malamud) - June 24, 17:00-19:00

In this tutorial for beginners, we will provide hands-on steps for using CHILDES, CHILDES-compatible corpora, and BiRCh corpora. We will illustrate how English L1 corpora (Adam from the Brown corpus) and Russian L1 acquisition (Gagarina's corpus and Jenna corpus; BiRCh) can be used to investigate the development of wh-questions (in English) and early noun bias, double-object constructions, and word order in Russian.

Twila Tardif, University of Michigan, United States

1) Cross-linguistic brain and behavioral findings on the acquisition of L1 morphology and syntax in children - June 22, 15:30-16:30

2) Second-language learning in children - June 24, 15:30-16:30