Language Sciences Annual Symposium 2026: Language and Communication Across Boundaries

The CLS Symposium is an annual meeting of minds, bringing together language scientists from all disciplines across the University of Cambridge for an afternoon of talks, poster presentations, and informal networking. 

The theme of this year’s Symposium is 'Language and Communication Across Boundaries' focussing on how language and communication enable connections across social, cultural, cognitive, historical, and geographic divides, while exploring emerging research in increasingly diverse, multilingual, and multimodal contexts.

Registration is now open – please book your place here.

Event Programme:

• 12:00 - 12:30 | Registration & Refreshments
• 12:30 - 12:35 | Welcome & Introductions 
• 12:35 - 13:15 | Interesting Things Happen at the Edges: Professor Laura Wright, Professor of the History of the English Language (Cambridge)
• 13:15 - 13:55 | Verb Movement Across Boundaries: On Syntactic Transfer and Stylistic Choices in Medieval Tuscan and French: Dr Norma Schifano, Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Romance Linguistics (Cambridge) 
• 13:55 - 14:15 | Coffee Break & Networking
• 14:15 - 14:55 | Sensory Perception and the Lexicon: Dr Elisabeth Norcliffe, Visiting Researcher, Surrey Morphology Group (Surrey)
• 14:55 - 15:30 | Poster Slam - Part 1
• 15:30 - 16:15 | Poster Exhibition & Refreshments
• 16:15 - 16:55 | It’s Like They Only See the Front Cover of Me: Dr Hannah Hobson, Senior Lecturer in Psychology (York)
• 16:55 - 17:35 | From Brain to Brain: What Language Models Reveal About Human Communication: Dr Ariel Goldstein, Assistant Professor in Cognitive Science (Cambridge)
• 17:35 - 18:10 | Poster Slam - Part 2
• 18:10 - 19:30 | Posters & Drinks Reception

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Cambridge University Press & Assessment in making this event possible.

Posters:

The call for posters is now closed. Accepted Posters will be presented in person at the Symposium on 19 November and hosted on the Cambridge University Press Open Engage platform. 

Poster Session Organisers: Ruchen Yu: ry328@cam.ac.uk and Oliver Dallas (DTAL)

Abstracts:

• Professor Laura Wright (Cambridge)

Title: Interesting Things Happen at the Edges

In this talk I claim that interesting things happen across language boundaries as features shift around over time. I use two sets of data: late 14th–late 15th century business writing in Britain, and 20th–21st century writing and speech in Gibraltar.  (It’s not as random as it sounds, the first is used to set the stage for the second.)  The boundaries in question include social, political and geographical boundaries, all of which have linguistic consequences; and the languages under discussion are Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman French, Middle English, Standard English, Llanito (Gibraltar’s historic contact variety of Spanish), and Gibraltarian English.  The features discussed are mostly morphemes with a brief look at segmental phonetics. In particular I focus on language loss and language birth, raising questions about how linguistic systems get to have language status.

•  Dr Norma Schifano (Cambridge)

Title: Verb Movement Across Boundaries: On Syntactic Transfer and Stylistic Choices in Medieval Tuscan and French

The aim of this talk is to contribute to the investigation of V-movement in non-V2 embedded clauses in early Romance by examining prose works by Brunetto Latini (Tuscany, 1220-1294). What makes this case study particularly fascinating is the fact that Brunetto wrote both in Tuscan, his native language, and in French. This gives us the opportunity not only to unveil patterns of embedded V-to-I movement in two distinct medieval Romance varieties, thus contributing to our understanding of this specific subset of largely unexplored word order patterns, but also to assess potential syntactic transfer in verb placements across the two languages at stake here. This is a particularly significant question in medieval Tuscany (and beyond), given the profound role that bi/multilingualism played at the time in this region and the possible role that this complex multilingual repertoire could have played in shaping the morphosyntax of what would become Italian.

• Dr Elisabeth Norcliffe (Surrey)

Title: Sensory Perception and the Lexicon

Sensory language has been of widespread interest as a route into understanding what is universal and what is culturally malleable in language. Since the seminal work on colour vocabularies, typologists have attempted to describe and explain worldwide linguistic patterning in this domain. One area of focus has concerned basic perception verbs (‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’ etc). An influential proposal holds that perception verb lexicons are universally constrained by a biologically-grounded hierarchy of senses, with vision at the top, followed by hearing, and then touch, taste and smell. In this talk I will present an overview of recent collaborative work which revisits this claim. Drawing on a large, global sample of perception verb lexicons, we find an overwhelming tendency for languages to have a dedicated verb for vision, consistent with the proposed hierarchy. The special status of vision is also mirrored in adult usage frequencies across diverse languages as well as in children's learning trajectories. By contrast, the lexicalisation patterns of the non-visual modalities do not conform to a fixed hierarchy, though they do show robust cross-linguistic regularities. We suggest these regularities can be adequately explained by domain-general conceptual and communicative principles, thus calling into question the assumption that human biology is the main driver of semantic patterns in the sensory domain.

• Dr Hannah Hobson (York)

Title: It’s Like They Only See the Front Cover of Me

Developmental Language Disorder affects 7% of school-age children and is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition, yet it remains chronically under-recognised and under-diagnosed. One mechanism that may perpetuate under recognition, as well as contribute to the increased risk of mental health problems amongst people with DLD, is camouflaging, behaviours which minimise the visibility of language difficulties. In three linked qualitative projects, we examined the experiences of speech and language therapists, parents of children with DLD, children with DLD and adults with DLD-like profiles, with regards to camouflaging. We then drew upon these reports to develop a parent-report camouflaging checklist for language and communication problems. 78 families (36 affected by DLD) completed our novel camouflaging measure: parents of children with DLD reported their children camouflaged more and were impacted more by camouflaging than families of children without DLD. Camouflaging predicted mental health symptoms over and above DLD group membership. Together, these projects provide qualitative and quantitative evidence for the phenomenon of camouflaging in DLD, highlight the role of others’ poor understanding of DLD in its development and maintenance, and suggest similar links between camouflaging and mental health as have been shown in the literature on autism and masking.

• Dr Ariel Goldstein (Cambridge)

Title: From Brain to Brain: What Language Models Reveal About Human Communication

How do thoughts move between minds, and what can artificial intelligence reveal about this process? In this talk, I bring together cognitive neuroscience and language modelling to examine the computational foundations of human communication.

Drawing on studies of neural responses during natural language processing and spontaneous conversation, I discuss evidence for shared computational principles between human brains and deep language models. I show how model representations provide a framework for investigating a shared linguistic space between speakers and listeners, and how the layered structure of language models corresponds to the temporal organisation of language processing in the brain. I also consider how speech-to-text models capture aspects of neural activity during everyday conversations.

Moving from comprehension to the generation of new information, I introduce ongoing work on how speakers drive conversations forward and how unspoken word alternatives are represented in the brain. Together, these studies connect questions about communication across individual minds with comparisons between biological and artificial systems. Rather than treating language models solely as engineering achievements, this research uses them to investigate the representations and computations underlying language, while asking where correspondence with human cognition is informative and where important differences remain.