The Linguistics Department just hosted the 17th Meeting of the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA-17)! The biannual academic conference took place on May 2nd – 4th at the Levis Faculty Center and attracted 148 registered attendees. GASLA-17 welcomed linguists to present theoretically informed research on second language acquisition from universities around the world.
This year, GASLA brought together experts in second language acquisition and psycholinguistics for four fascinating plenary talks:
- Dora Alexopoulou (University of Cambridge): Big learner corpora: any good for theoretical SLA research?
- Kiel Christianson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Applying Auditory Perceptual Simulation (APS) to increase L2 syntactic knowledge
- Theres Grüter (University of Hawai’i, Manoa): A view from beyond the pigeonhole: Insights and challenges from a cross-population perspective on language acquisition and processing
- Silvia Perpiñán (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain): Development and ultimate attainment in societal bilingualism
The three conference days also featured 27 competitive talks and 29 poster presentations on second language acquisition and bilingualism, a workshop on eye-tracking, and a combined poster meeting with the UIUC SLATE Research Symposium. GASLA-17 was an excellent showcase of SLA research at UIUC, particularly SLA research inspired by generative grammar. Faculty, graduate students, and alumni from UIUC were all represented among the talks and poster presentations.
We extend our warmest thanks to the generous sponsors and funders:
- National Science Foundation (BCS-2336394)
- School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Department of French & Italian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Last, but certainly not least, a huge thanks to everyone who made this conference possible. Thank you to the 20 undergraduate student volunteers who made GASLA-17 run smoothly, and to the GASLA-17 organizing committee - Amy Atiles, Martine Gallardo, Walther Glodstaf, Aylin Coşkun Kunduz, Chae Eun Lee, Danny Melendez (UIUC Spanish Department), Isela Silvera and Amelia Tighe - who worked for months in preparation for the event and during all days of the conference! A huge thank you and congratulations to the conference faculty organizers, Silvina Montrul and Tania Ionin for their dedication in making this conference possible!
More conference information can be found on the GASLA-17 Website.
More photos can be found here.
