Farewell CADAAD 2018

Thank you to the lovely people at Aalborg University, Denmark for hosting a fine conference. The city and its people were very welcoming and offered an excellent location for CADAAD 2018. We eagerly await news for the next venue - which is likely to be outside Europe for the first time.
The programme contained plenty of interesting papers and lots of fascinating research projects. Main topics included healthcare, education, identity, the language of Brexit, and issues of methodology. The conference offered papers of a very high standard and most parallel sessions required difficult choices to be made of what to see and what to miss.
The plenary sessions were informative and thought-provoking (er, with one exception) and fortunately all of them are available from here. Here is a small sample:

Finally, here is the presentation that I was lucky enough to share with some of the delegates. I am glad to say that it generated a lot of questions (and not all of them supportive in nature). Thank you Aalborg.

LLL: Language, Literacy & Learning

So, I felt I just had to post this notice of this  workshop arranged by University of Reading's 'Language and Literacy in Education' group, called Language, Literacy and Learning in EAL children. Well, it almost matches the name of this blog, doesn't it?

This is an event from a fairly new research group, so I wish them well.

I missed the workshop, which took place on 21st March, but you can still find slides from the main presenters from here.

To quote from the site:
The event focused on four areas of research and practice with EAL children:
• Policy (Emily Waddilove and Naomi Flynn)
• Assessment (Katherine Solomon and Claudine Bowyer–Crane)
• Vocabulary, language and literacy (Kay Clarke and Holly Joseph)
• Home language and literacy (Jamie Earnshaw and Hamish Chalmers)

Analysing Casual Conversation

This is what great linguistic analysis looks like. Eggins & Slade took a seemingly impossible object of analysis and through careful application of key principles reveal significant insights into the apparently random phenomenon of conversation. Synthesising insights from conversation analysis into a systemic functional framework they introduce us through sympathetic prose to a model that will inform the linguistic analysis of conversation for years to come.

Another lazy Goodreads steal.

Words on the brain

The Visual Thesaurus (see this earlier posting and this link) may not just be a representation, according to this research: Alexander G. Huth, Wendy A. De Heer, Thomas L. Griffiths, Frédéric E. Theunissen, & Jack L. Gallant. (2016). Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex. Nature, 532(7600), 453-8.
In this study, subjects were placed in an fMRI scanner while listening to stories, and measurements
were taken in order to correlate blood flow with the words from the story. What they found, perhaps surprisingly, is that across subjects, words cluster semantically across all regions of the brain, producing clustered networks of semantically related words, much like the visual thesaurus. That is, words with a similar meaning appear to be associated within the same small area of the brain.
You can explore these relations and see the sample lexical items that were matched up in the stories in the experiments from the website here. The tour also shows how you can adjust the settings to view more detail and adjust the image. As well as the astonishing results, the visualisations that realise the findings are amazing.
Although it is not especially new, the paper and the website offer a valuable insight into semantic mapping. What we now need is a similar study that allows a more dynamic approach so that the networks and relationships between all of these items and clusters can also be mapped.