The 7th biennial conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA 7) will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on September 8-10, 2016.
The GALANA conference features theoretically informed research on all types of language acquisition scenarios, including (but not limited to) monolingual first language acquisition, bilingual/multilingual first language acquisition, second language acquisition by children as well as adults, third language acquisition, acquisition of signed as well as spoken languages, language disorders, language acquisition in the presence of cognitive impairment and autism, and the development of pidgins and creoles. GALANA-7 will include a special session on ''Input Variation and Language Acquisition.''
The invited speakers for the main session are Cynthia Fisher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Roumyana Slabakova (University of Southampton), and Virginia Valian (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center).
The invited speakers for the special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition are Karen Miller (Pennsylvania State University) and Janna Oetting (Louisiana State University).
Conference URL: https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/
Conference email: galana7.2016@gmail.com
Abstract Submission Deadline: 10-Feb-2016
GALANA-7 invites abstracts of no more than 500 words (with an optional second page for examples, figures and references) for double-blind peer review.
Guidelines and instructions about abstract submission can be found at https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/abstract-guidelines-and-submission/
For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, bilingualism, multilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.
Abstracts are also invited for a special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition. Understanding how children use input to help form a grammar is central to an adequate theory of language acquisition. Broad differences in input based on dialect variation have been used as a fixed effect in explaining differences in children's grammars. Between-child differences within homogeneous samples of families, similar in socio-economic statuses, speaking the same dialect have also provided insight. The special session Input Variation and Language Acquisition asks how these two approaches relate to one another; specifically how language variety as a fixed effect relates to the random effects of between-child variation within a language variety. The papers presented in this special session will advance theories of grammatical acquisition and applications in the field of child language disorders.
