Q-LAP 2025

• Abstract submission: 06.10.2025 to 19.10.2025
• Notification of acceptance: 31.10.2025
• Registration: 31.10.2025 to 13.11.2025
• Workshop: 04. & 05.12.2025

We are pleased to announce the first workshop in the Q-LAP series (Questions in Language Acquisition and Processing), to be held in Mannheim in December 2025. The workshop provides a forum for researchers investigating language learning and processing from an experimental perspective. The first two-day workshop will focus on language acquisition and processing in the first years of life, in particular phonological and lexical development. The workshop will feature invited talks and two poster sessions and provide ample time for discussion and networking in coffee and lunch breaks.

Invited speakers include (in alphabetical order):

• Titia Benders (University of Amsterdam)
• Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (University of Potsdam)
• Paula Fikkert (University of Nijmegen)
• Nivedita Mani (University of Göttingen)
• Sho Tsuji (CNRS/ENS)

We welcome abstracts for poster contributions addressing topics in early language development including (but not limited to):

• Early speech perception and production
• Lexical development and word learning
• Multimodal learning and processing
• Early literacy and its relation to oral language
• Cross-linguistic perspectives on acquisition
• Theoretical models of language learning

Abstracts should be max. 300 words (excluding references) and may include up to two figures/tables. Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format by Sunday October 19, 2025. Abstracts will be evaluated based on content clarity, soundness of study design and thematic relevance. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of October.

Thursday, 4.12.2025

• 09:00 Registration
• 10:00 Opening
• 10:30 Prof. Dr. Nivedita Mani (Universität Göttingen)

Little scientists, social apprentices: Caregiver-child dynamics in early word learning

Piagetian approaches to development highlight the role of the child as a little scientist, actively exploring her world so as to optimise learning. Empirical research on young children’s learning convincingly demonstrates that children actively solicit what they want to learn, when they want to learn and whom they want to learn from Vygostky's little apprentice, on the other hand, learns language in social interactions with knowledgeable others. I suggest that any theory of language learning must combine these two approaches to consider language as a dynamic interaction between the child, her interests, her current state of knowledge and the sociocognitive context she finds herself in. In this talk, I will present a series of studies examining the extent to which children’s interest in learning about particular aspects of their environment, their intrinsic motivation to learn and their engagement in a task influences their word learning success. At the same time, I will embed these findings in studies showing that learning takes place in dynamic sociocultural contexts where children, like social apprentices, learn from those who are already in possession of the information they are after. In doing so, I will ask the question why children learn language, in terms of why we find idiosyncrasies in early lexical development and whether children are motivated to learn language. 

• 11:30 Prof. Dr. Sho Tsuji (CNRS/ENS, Paris, Frankreich & Universität Tokyo, Japan) 

How infants acquire their native language within their social context

Language is a uniquely human system of communication, acquired by infants with remarkable speed and efficiency across diverse linguistic and cultural settings. Social interaction plays a pivotal role in this process, shaping infants' experiences from birth and influencing cognition from attention to higher-level learning.

What makes social language learning so powerful? I will present two lines of research, which both have in common that they study infants as active participants in social interaction. Using lab experiments with reactive devices, I demonstrate the impact of socially contingent interaction for learning in moment-to-moment interactions. Using wearable devices and long-form audio recordings, I access infants’ real-live socio-communicative experiences at home, and study the effect of the cumulative information resulting from communication sequences on language acquisition in ongoing work.

• 12:30 Lunch
• 14:00 Prof. Dr. Paula Fikkert (Universität Nijmegen, Niederlande) tba
• 15:00 Coffee & Poster Session 1 (presenting authors)

Natasja Delbar (Leiden University): Prompted revisions – a window into speech production development in toddlers

Jana Engel (University of Tübingen): Stress processing of familiar words in 2- to 5-year-olds learning German

Josephine Funken (University of Potsdam): Toward dynamical modelling of infants’ looking times

Hannah Gauditz (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau): Coloured syllables in different stages of reading acquisition

Lea Härms (MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences): Neural responses to infants’ audiovisual processing of human and monkey vocalizations

Stefanie Peykarjou (CFH Wiesbaden): Influence of infant-directed speech on visual learning and object-label association in toddlers – an online eye-tracking study

Leonardo Piot (University of Potsdam & University of Paris-Cité): Cross-linguistic difference in infants’ early phonotactic sensitivity relate to non-native speech sound discrimination – an investigation of the /s/-/ʃ/ contrast in French- and German-learning infants

Felicia Stich (University of Göttingen): Systematicity in the early lexicon across the world’s languages – do similar word forms cue similar meanings?

Nils Tolksdorf (University of Heidelberg): Looking beyond right and wrong – capturing granularities in children’s referential behavior when learning words across social partners and temperamental shyness

• 19:00 Conference dinner

Friday, 5.12.2025

• 09:00 Invited Talk Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Universität Potsdam) tba
• 10:00 Prof. Dr. Titia Benders (Universität Amsterdam, Niederlande)

Children’s speech sound production in context – what can it (not) reveal about developing encoding and articulation?

To become fluent speakers of their language(s), children need to produce speech sounds that are finely adjusted to the context in which they appear. This requires not only complete phonological representations of the speech sounds themselves, but also mature phonetic encoding of the contextual adjustments, and articulatory thereof. In this talk, I will explore what acoustic analysis of children’s speech sounds in context can (and cannot) reveal about development across these levels of representation. The first half of the talk will be about research lead by Anwar Alkhudidi on the production of the (Hijazi-)Arabic plain-emphatic contrast by 3-to-6-year-old children, a contrast mostly through coarticulation. The second half of the talk will present work by Rui Cai on the prosodic integration of (Australian-)English function words by 4-to-11-year-old children, which is achieved through temporal adjustments. The results will be compared and contrasted, to of the factors that should be considered in developing a model of speech production development.

• 11:00 Coffee & Poster Session 2 (presenting authors)

Anne-Sophie Brilla (University of Amsterdam): Toddlers’ processing of truncated known words in a looking-while-listening task

Antonia Feigenbaum (University of Mannheim): Within- and between-language ambiguity resolution in children – the role of executive functions

Lara Hamburger (University of Potsdam): Manipulating robot social cues in infant-robot interaction – implications for word segmentation performance

Milena Marx (University of Heidelberg): Influence of auditory stimulation on rapid visual categorisation in 4-month-olds – an FPVS study

Stefanie Radetzky (University of Mannheim): Perception and categorisation of reduced syllables in German-speaking preschoolers

Mila Reinsch (University of Mannheim): Read to me! A study on parental reading strategies and early language development

Jessica Steil (University of Tübingen): Developing language-space associations in children under four years

Fleur Vissers (Radboud University Nijmegen): Toddlers’ word recognition – comparing a story-based pupillometry paradigm to a looking-while-listening paradigm

Katie von Holzen (University of Braunschweig): The role of lexical overlap in foreign language speech segmentation before and after instruction

• 13:00 Closing & Farewell

The workshop will take place at University of Mannheim, providing an interdisciplinary platform for exchange and collaboration in language acquisition research. Talks and poster session will be hosted at B6, 30–32 in room 008.1 on the ground floor. You can find out more about Mannheim on the tourist information office’s homepage here. 

As the castle is situated in the city center close to the station, there are numerous hotels close to the venue, such as:

NYX Hotel

Motel One

Hotel Wegner

Kurpfalzstuben

Registration will be open after notification of acceptance from 31.10.2025 to 13.11.2025. Participation in the workshop will be free of charge, but registration is mandatory. Places are limited to 50 participants. Should there be more registrations than available places, priority will be given to poster presenters. Non-presenting participants will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Please click here to register for Q-LAP 2025.

The workshop series is organized by the Chair of Psycholinguistics, University of Mannheim, and the Mannheim Language Learning Lab Wortakrobaten. Please find more information about the group at https://www.phil.uni-mannheim.de/en/department-of-english/sub-depts/anglistik-i/ . If you have any questions concerning the workshop please contact the organizers via email to altvater-mackensenmail-uni-mannheim.de