Conference: Prosodic and psycholinguistic connections in verb-initial languages

Some languages around the world have the special linguistic property of being verb initial in word order, e.g., “Read Maria the book” rather than “Maria read the book". In fact, languages belonging to a diverse variety of language families are verb initial. Better understanding the commonalities and differences between languages that are typologically similar yet unrelated can advance linguistic theory. To foster this understanding, this special session on prosody and psycholinguistics in verb-initial languages is held during the annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association. The special session brings together researchers who work on verb-initial languages in Austronesian and other language families, creating a space for scholars who do not normally collaborate to share ideas and perspectives, and to develop new collaborations. It also introduces researchers working on understudied verb-initial languages to current methods and theories in prosody and psycholinguistics, with the aim of encouraging future work on a larger pool of languages. In addition, the conference and special session feature work by junior scholars and scholars from underrepresented communities. This project supports the special session “Prosodic and psycholinguistic connections in verb initial languages” to be held at the annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association. The conference regularly sees approximately 40–60 attendees (faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students) from around the world. The special session is designed to bring in researchers who work on prosody and psycholinguistics in verb-initial languages to help advance theoretical work by creating a space for scholars who do not normally collaborate to share ideas and perspectives. The special session fosters discussion of the commonalities in the comprehension and production of verb-initial languages and the prosody of verb-initial languages. These discussions lead to studies that, in turn, inform existing theories of sentence processing and prosody, which have been developed primarily based on verb-medial and verb-final languages. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.