Talk series and reading groups

Regular meetings to discuss research, books and papers

Linguistic Circle

Invited talks on a range of Linguistics topics from high-profile speakers

PPLS interdisciplinary seminar series

Meets between 3-6 times a year to host speakers of an international calibre

Developmental linguistics seminars

Discussing research into first and second language acquisition

English language research group meetings

Research presentations and discussion on English language and linguistics

Language variation and change seminars

Interdisciplinary group exploring language variation and change across multiple disciplines

Meaning and grammar research group meetings

Presentations and discussion of research into syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology

Phonetics/phonology workshop

The meeting series of the Phonetics and Phonology Research Group

Bilingualism and Developmental Linguistics research group

Discussing theoretical and experimental issues in bilingualism and language acquisition.

Historical phonology reading group

Discussing recent and/or important work in historical phonology

Sociolinguistics reading group

Open to anyone at the university who is interested in sociolinguistics

The Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics runs a series of Catchup Sessions, which are informal gatherings for historical linguistics researchers at Edinburgh.

The sessions are meant as an opportunity to find out what other AMC-linked staff and students are working on, to try out new ideas, discuss data, and more generally, to provide a sense of community.

Sessions are usually led by a member of staff or student who tells us a bit about their current research interests and walks us through and idea, data-set or methodology. The group is invited to comment, propose solutions, find links with their own work, and provide an overall ‘sanity-check’ for the contributor’s project.

To emphasise the social side of the catchup sessions, we provide something sweet to share at every session. Attendees are encouraged to bring a hot or cold drink.

The organisers are currently:

To find out about our past and upcoming sessions, visit the AMC’s website:

If you would like to be added to our mailing list or would like to be a contributor to our sessions, email us at: amc@ed.ac.uk.


Celtic languages from a variety of perspectives. (Reading group on hiatus).

The Celtic Linguistics Reading Group provides a forum for anybody in the University and the wider community who is interested in the Celtic languages from a variety of perspectives. We welcome discussion of papers (or presentation of own work) in any area of theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and language policy, language technology, and any other relevant area.

Mailing list

To be updated about future events and readings, send an email to sympa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk with the text 'subscribe celtling YOUR NAME' or contact Pavel losad.

Email sympa

Contact

The group is convened by Dr Pavel Losad and Dr William Lamb. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with either of the convenors if you would like to join the group.

Pavel losad

William Lamb

---

Tha Buidheann Leughaidh Cànanachais Cheiltich a' tabhann fòram ioma-thaobhach do gach neach anns an Oilthigh agus anns a' choimhearsnachd mun cuairt aig a bheil ùidh anns na cànanan Ceilteach. Cuiridh sinn fàilte air leughaidhean de gach seòrsa (obair nam ball fhèin nam measg) a tha co-ceangailte ri cànanachas teòiridheil, cànanachas gnìomhach, sòisio-chànanachas, poileasaidh cànain, teicneòlas cànain, no raon freagarrach eile.

Tha a' bhuidheann ga stiùireadh leis an Oll. Pavel Losad agus Oll. Pavel losad agus an Oll. Uilleam Lamb. Leig fhaicinn do Phavel no do dh'Uilleam ma tha ùidh agad sa bhuidhinn.

Pavel losad

William Lamb

Tha liosta post-dealain againn; airson fios fhaighinn air tachartasan agus leughaidhean san àm ri teachd, cuir brath thugainn aig sympa@mlist.is.ac.uk leis an teacsa 'subscribe celtling D'AINM', air neo dìreach gu Pavel losad fhèin.

Email sympa

Email Pavel losad


Presentations and discussions on the evolution of language, culture and communication.

Presentations and discussion of research into language evolution with prominent researchers from Edinburgh and elsewhere. Recent topics include emotional arousal, utterance selection, social-cultural determination of complexity, and learning biases.

Time and place

Typically, Tuesdays 11:30am - 12:30pm in room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building.

Please note that date and venue may vary - check the Centre for Language Evolution webpage for details of individual talks.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Centre for Language Evolution


Presentations and discussions on cognition in language and beyond.

The CLRG research seminars are open to everyone with an interest in the cognitive mechanisms underlying language use and its relation with other aspects of human cognition. Our topics include language representation and processing, conceptual organisation, usage-based grammar, metaphor and figurative speech, linguistic creativity, and many more. The meetings feature talks from invited speakers, presentations of work in progress, and discussions of recent publications and open research problems in the field. Interdisciplinary contributions are particularly welcome.

Time and place

Usually fortnightly on Tuesdays from 11 am to 12 pm in room 7.01, Dugald Stewart Building. Please check the LEL events page for details on times and locations.

Upcoming meetings

Upcoming events are listed on the LEL events page

Contact

If you’d like more information about the events this semester, or if you’d like to present at one of our meetings, please email one of our committee members (see below). To subscribe to our mailing list, please use the following link:

Mailing list


Discussing recent and/or important work in developmental phonology

The developmental phonology (devphon) reading group meets every other week to discuss recent and/or important work related to the learning of sounds and sound patterns across the lifespan. The group is convened by Annie Holtz. Feel free to get in touch if you would like to come (and/or to be added to our mailing list).

Here is a list of our past meetings:

2024-25

  • 31st March 2025: Solá-Llonch, E., & Sundara, M. (2025). Young infants’ sensitivity to precursors of vowel harmony is independent of language experience. Infant Behavior and Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2025.102032
  • 17th March 2025: Coetzee, A. W. (2008). Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in phonology. Language, 84(2), 218-257. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0000
  • 17th February 2025: Yin, S. H., & White, J. (2018). Neutralization and homophony avoidance in phonological learning. Cognition, 179, 89-101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.023
  • 4th February 2025: Storkel, H. L., Armbrüster, J., & Hogan, T. P. (2006). Differentiating phonotactic probability and neighborhood density in adult word learning. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 46(6). https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2006/085)
  • 6th January 2025: Finley, S. (2022). Generalization to Novel Consonants: Place Versus Voice. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 51(6), 1283–1309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09897-1
  • 2nd December 2024: Linzen, T. & Gallagher, G., (2017) Rapid generalization in phonotactic learning, Laboratory Phonology 8: 24. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.44
  • 11th November 2024: Chong, A.J. (2021). The effect of phonotactics on alternation learning. Language 97(2), 213-244. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2021.0017
  • 28th October: Finley, S. (2017). Locality and harmony: Perspectives from artificial grammar learning. Language and Linguistics Compass, 11(1), e12233. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12233

2023-24

  • 13th August 2024: Cathcart, C. A. (2024). Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(27), e2316677121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2316677121
  • 23rd July 2024: Gong, S. & Zhang, J. (preprint, 2024). The Obligatory Contour Principle as a substantive bias in phonological learning. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4736206 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4736206
  • 25th June 2024: Kehoe, M., & Havy, M. (2019). Bilingual phonological acquisition: the influence of language-internal, language-external, and lexical factors. Journal of Child Language, 46(2), 292–333. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000478
  • 18th June 2024: Zahner-Ritter, K., Zhao, T., Einfeldt, M., & Braun, B. (2022). How experience with tone in the native language affects the L2 acquisition of pitch accents. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 903879.
  • 11th June 2024: Laméris, T. J., Llompart, M., & Post, B. (2023). Non-native tone categorization and word learning across a spectrum of L1 tonal statuses. Bilingualism (Cambridge, England), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728923000871
  • 28th May 2024: Quam, C., Clough, L., Knight, S. & Gerken, L. (2021), Infants' discrimination of consonant contrasts in the presence and absence of talker variability. Infancy, 26, 84-103. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12371.
  • 14th May 2024:
  • 23rd April 2023: Raviv, L., Lupyan, G., & Green, S. C. (2022). How variability shapes learning and generalization. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(6), 462–483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.007
  • 16th April 2024: Moore, C., & Bergelson, E. (2024). Wordform variability in infants’ language environment and its effects on early word learning. Cognition, 245, 105694–105694. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105694
  • 19th March 2024: Creel, S. C., & Frye, C. I. (2024). Minimal gains for minimal pairs: Difficulty in learning similar-sounding words continues into preschool. Journal of experimental child psychology, 240, 105831. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105831
  • 5th March 2024: Moulin-Frier, C., & Oudeyer, P.-Y. (2012). Curiosity-driven phonetic learning. 2012 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1109/DevLrn.2012.6400583
  • 20th February 2024: Do, Y., Van Hoey, T., & Yu, B. (in prep). Mitigating the trade-off between verification and speculation in learning vowel harmony. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/x9fct
  • 30th January 2024: Shi, J., Gu, Y., & Vigliocco, G. (2023). Prosodic modulations in child‐directed language and their impact on word learning. Developmental Science, 26(4), e13357-n/a. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13357
  • 28th November 2023: Isbilen, E. S., & Christiansen, M. H. (2022). Statistical Learning of Language: A Meta-Analysis Into 25 Years of Research. Cognitive science, 46(9), e13198. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13198
  • 14th November 2023: Tzeng, C.Y., Russell, M.L. & Nygaard, L.C. (2023). Attention modulates perceptual learning of non-native-accented speech. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02790-6
  • 31st October 2023: Nielsen, A. K., & Dingemanse, M. (2021). Iconicity in word learning and beyond: A critical review. Language and Speech, 64(1), 52-72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920914339
  • 3rd October 2023: McMurray, B. (2022). The myth of categorical perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(6), 3819-3842. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0016614
  • 12th September 2023: Ter Haar, S. M., Fernandez, A. A., Gratier, M., Knörnschild, M., Levelt, C., Moore, R. K., Vellema, M., Wang, X., & Oller, D. K. (2021). Cross-species parallels in babbling: animals and algorithms. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376(1836), 20200239.

2022-23


The Edinburgh Seminar on Morphological Theory (EdinMorph): an interdisciplinary reading and discussion group for morphology and its interfaces.

EdinMorph provides an informal setting to discuss work in morphology, broadly construed: morphophonology, argument structure, lexical semantics, lexical processing, acquisition and computational modelling. Members come from all career levels (undergraduates, MSc students, PhD students, postdocs and academic staff) across PPLS and Informatics.

Time and place

We meet 3-4 times a month - currently on Thursday mornings - for discussion followed by communal BYO lunch.

Upcoming meetings

Meetings are co-ordinated in the dedicated MS Team.

Contact

Get in touch with Itamar Kastner to be added to the Team.

Itamar Kastner


A series of seminars considering how language is (re)shaped by context.

The Language in Context (LinC) seminars are fortnightly meetings at which we discuss language in its many guises and in the multifarious contexts in which it is used. We are primarily concerned with the various ways in which language influences and is influenced by the structural, discursive, socio-political, institutional or interpersonal environments in which they exist. We welcome research from the field of Applied Linguistics but also any other relevant fields including Modern Languages and Cultures, Historical Language Studies, Education, Sociology (of Language), Linguistic Anthropology, Psychology, Philosophy and others. Potential seminar topics could include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Language Attitudes and Ideologies
  • Language Endangerment, Shift and Death
  • Minority Languages and Cultures
  • Language Policy and Politics
  • Language Revitalisation
  • Language and Identity
  • Discourse Analysis
  • Corpus Linguistics
  • Bi/Multilingualism
  • Language Education
  • Translation Studies
  • Historical Sociolinguistics

Researchers currently working on a related project will be invited to speak at each meeting. Speculative requests for particular speakers are also welcome!

Get involved

Our seminars will take place approximately every fortnight from 15:10 until 16:30, and our usual venue will be room G32, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ (unless otherwise stated – please be sure to subscribe to the mailing list to be notified of our schedule). In addition, following each seminar there will be an opportunity for further discussion and networking with colleagues and invited speakers, usually over a cup of tea and a muffin!

Furthermore, this year, we would like to make it easier for our members to suggest potential speakers for our seminars – whether from the University of Edinburgh or (subject to feasibility) from another UK Higher Education Institution. Speakers can be either established academics, or early career (MSc, PhD and Postdoctoral) researchers. If there is a particular person that you think we should invite to talk at Language in Context, please send us a suggestion using our dedicated form which you can find here:

Speaker Request Form (opens external webpage)

Contact

If you would like any further information about the Language in Context Seminar Series, or have any recommendations or feedback you’d like to give us, you are warmly invited to contact József Wells at:

linc@ed.ac.uk

To sign up to the mailing list, and be kept up to date with future events, please follow the link below, log in and click “Subscribe”:

Mailing list

If you have a Facebook account, come along, join the group, and introduce yourself! And also, introduce the group to any colleagues who might also be interested – the more the merrier!

Facebook

Follow us on Twitter:

Twitter

Upcoming talks

Upcoming events are listed on the LEL events page

We hope to see you very soon!

József Wells

Co-ordinators of LinC


Open to anyone at the university who is interested in studying language uses, social interactions and multimodal communication in the digital and social media contexts.

We explore a range of topics, including (but not limited to):

  • Social media discourses and online identities;
  • Discourse, pragmatic and (socio)linguistic approaches to computer-mediated-communication;
  • Methods and methodologies for studying language and other modes of communication (such as voices, gestures, images, etc) online;
  • Linguistic studies using the internet as their main sources of data;
  • Theoretical developments in digital cultural and social media studies.

Time and place

We meet for an hour every fortnight to discuss advanced research articles. Undergraduates, postgraduates, and staff members are all welcome.

Contact

If you’d like more information about the events this semester please email one of our convenors (see below). To subscribe to our mailing list, please use the following link:

Mailing list

The convenor for this group currently is Sumin Zhao:

Upcoming talks

Upcoming events are listed on the LEL events page


The Phonological Theory Reading Group (PhThRG) is a forum for discussing current and classic work in theoretical phonology, primarily within a synchronic perspective.

We focus both on conceptual issues and on analyses of interesting data, and welcome suggestions for both current research and work from the past.

The group’s convenors are Pavel Iosad, Brandon Kieffer, and Anna Laoide-Kemp. You can subscribe to the mailing list by following the instructions on this page (the list is called phthrg). Alternatively, get in touch with one of the convenors.

Forthcoming

  • Date TBC, 11:10–12:00, DSB 4.01 and Teams. Köhnlein, B. (2018). A morpheme-based approach to subtractive pluralisation in German dialects. Phonology, 35(4), 617-647.

Past meetings

  • 15th October 2024, 11:10–12:00, DSB 4.01 and Teams. Newell, Heather. Phases and phonology. Draft for the Wiley Companion to Phonology, 2nd edition.
  • 27th February 2024, 13:10–14:00, DSB 4.01 and Teams. Raimy, Eric. 2021. Privativity and ternary phonological behavior. In Sabrina Bendjaballah, Ali Tifrit and Laurence Voeltzel (eds.), Perspectives on Element Theory, 65-110. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
  • 13th February 2024, 14:10–15:00 (NB! different time). Joint meeting with the Meaning and Grammar Research Group. Room G26, Psychology Building, 7 George Square. Kim, Yuni. 2022. Grammatical and lexical sources of allomorphy in Amuzgo inflectional tone. Phonology 39(3). 531-558.
  • 30th January 2024, 13:10–14:00. DSB 7.01 and Teams. Uchihara, Hiroto & Pérez Báez, Gabriela. 2016. Fortis/lenis, glides and vowels in Quiaviní Zapotec. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1): 27.
  • 24th November 2023, 15:10–16:00, DSB 7.01 and Teams. Blaho, Sylvia & Curt Rice. 2014. Overgeneralization and falsifiability in phonological theory. In Jacques Durand, Gjert Kristoffersen & Bernard Laks (eds.( La phonologie de français: normes, périphéries, modélisation. Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002323
  • 10th November 2023, 10:00–10:50. DSB 4.01 (at Teams). Chabot (to appear) continued
  • 27th October 2023, 15:10–16:00, DSB 7.01 (and Teams). Chabot, Alex. To appear. What phonology is and why it should be. Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Linguistics. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007518

Contact


SPRG is the Semantics and Pragmatics reading group.

The sessions are open to all members of the university community (students of all levels, postdocs, academic staff).

We convene fortnightly to discuss different topics and issues related to semantic and pragmatic phenomena.

Organisers

We have a mailing list: sprg@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk

Website: Semantics & Pragmatics reading group | blogs.ed.ac.uk


NILA is a reading & discussion group for papers related to historical, theoretical and methodological issues on native and indigenous languages of the Americas.

Our general themes are cross-boundary related to historical linguistics, typology and theoretical investigations using American languages as case studies. Students of all levels as well as faculty are welcome.

Organisers

We have a mailing list: nila@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk

If you want only to subscribe to the mailing list, please send an email to sympa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk with the subject line: subscribe nila Firstname Lastname. Do not write anything in the email body.

Website: NILA – Native Indigenous Languages of the Americas | blogs.ed.ac.uk


A reading group for the exchange of knowledge and discussion of ideas relating to Turkic languages and phonological theory between Edinburgh and Uppsala.

The TurkPhon Reading Group comes out of the project “The trajectory and distributional typology of phonological change” on which Stephen Nichols and Pavel Iosad at the University of Edinburgh work together with László Károly and Deepthi Gopal at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Using data from various Turkic languages, the project aims to explore issues relating to sound change and phonological theory, including the life cycle of phonological processes. In this same vein, the reading group aims to expose those of us of a phonological bent to more of the literature on Turkic languages and Turcology and, conversely, to help those of us more well-versed in Turcology to become more familiar with the broader phonological literature.

Time and place

The reading group is run entirely online. It is open to any and all interested staff and postgraduate students from both the University of Edinburgh and Uppsala University.

Readings

Contact

Our mailing list and subscription:

If you would like to take part or have any questions, please e-mail Stephen Nichols:


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