News

Explore Language Sciences at the Cambridge Festival!19 March – 4 April 2025Join us at the Cambridge Festival for a fascinating lineup of events exploring the many dimensions of Language Sciences. Discover cutting-edge research from newborn communication signals to how identity drives language change. Meet Furhat, the conversational robot, and explo…

Dr Rachael Griffiths and Dr Marieke Meelen led a successful workshop on Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) at Trinity Hall last November. The event was funded by Cambridge Language Sciences, following an open call for workshops to promote the sharing of research methods between disciplines.Over the course of the day, participants from History, Angl…

‘How can learning a language be made effortless?’This ‘moonshot’ question was the focus of this year’s Language Sciences Annual Symposium which took place on 21 November at Cripps Court, Magdalene College.The moonshots are ambitious questions of societal importance developed as part of Cambridge Language Sciences’ strategy to address large-scale ch…

New call for Language Sciences Incubator FundCambridge Language Sciences invites applications for the Language Sciences Incubator Fund, offering seed funding to support interdisciplinary research in the language sciences.This round offers additional funding opportunities for AI-focused proposals. We have the following funding opportunities availabl…

Henriëtte Hendriks is Professor of Language Acquisition and Cognition in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.Her research focuses on the relationship between language and cognition, and she is particularly interested on how children acquire their first language compared to how adults learn a secon…

Saloni Krishnan is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on childhood communication disorders, such as DLD (developmental language disorder) and dyslexia. Saloni is based at UCL Language and Cognition, where she is Associate Professor in Developmental Language Sciences. Saloni has received funding from the Academy of Medic…

Dr Emma James is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of York. Her research focuses on the fundamental processes of how both children and adults learn, drawing upon memory, language and literacy research.  She investigates key questions such as: How do we learn and retain new words? How do these processes change across devel…

Jean-Marc Dewaele is Honorary Professor at the Institute of Education, University College London and Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck, University of London. His research spans social sciences and applied linguistics and focuses broadly on the effects of individual differences – often interacting with context…

Cambridge Language Sciences hosted a hybrid seminar in Cambridge on 15 March on the use of artificial languages to better understand second language learning.The event showcased findings of an ongoing research collaboration between researchers in Theoretical & Applied Linguistics at Cambridge and at the Institute of Cultural Sciences at Chuo Univer…

We are delighted to announce that three new projects have been awarded seed funding through the Language Sciences Incubator Fund.The successful applicants from the latest call were announced on 11 April 2024.We would like to congratulate all concerned and thank the reviewers for giving their time to evaluate the proposals. Posters on the funded res…

A new language sciences related project on improving language equity is one of five winners of AI-deas funding supporting artificial intelligence innovations to address critical societal issues.Dr Matt Davis, Cambridge Language Sciences co-Director and Programme Leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC-CBU), will lead a project call…

‘Language and Mental Wellbeing’ was the theme of this year’s Language Sciences Annual Symposium which took place on 16 November at Cripps Court, Magdalene College.This year’s event was inspired by the ‘moonshot’ question ‘How can language use allow us to understand and predict mental health conditions?’.The moonshots are ambitious questions of soci…

Police officers, legal professionals and forensic speech scientists joined academics from the Improving Voice Identification Procedures (IVIP) research team for a day of knowledge exchange at Selwyn College on 22 September.The event was an opportunity to share findings from IVIP – an interdisciplinary project on earwitness evidence and voice parade…

Cambridge Language Sciences are offering seed funding of up to £5,000 to support interdisciplinary research in the language sciences through the Language Sciences Incubator Fund. The next call will open on 20 November 2023. The Language Sciences Incubator Fund is an opportunity to: Develop new ideas and collaborationsRun pilot studies that could le…

A series of impact events on the science of learning were hosted by the NTU-Cambridge Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition (CLIC) in Singapore this summer.The events, attended by over 1,500 people, including school children, teachers, and government agencies, were an opportunity to share CLIC’s latest research and engage with p…