MEDAL Summer School in Experimental Linguistics
2024 marked the year of the second summer school in the 3-year MEDAL project. The summer school took place between the 17th and 21st of June in Nijmegen, in the buildings of the Max Planck Institute, the Donders Institute, and the Centre for Language Studies of Radboud University. This time, the method that was front and centre was Experimental Linguistics. Quite a popular theme it seems, because registrations were full pretty quickly and we received about 100 people in Nijmegen from not just Estonia and the UK, but from all over the world! We had a bit of competition from the Rammstein concert that took place at the same time, so accommodation in the city was fully-booked, but luckily everyone had a roof under their head in the end (which was needed with the capricious Dutch summer).
The first plenary was delivered by Pamela Perniss from the University of Cologne. She tackled a big question: What can we learn from language by studying iconicity? She broke it down into smaller steps: for example, how do we even begin to measure iconicity? She showed examples from various sign languages. Can you guess which BSL sign is more iconic: the sign for tree or paper? On the second day, Susanne Brouwer from Nijmegen’s own Radboud University opened by going back to the basics of experimental design. She drew inspiration from the stereotypical adults in the book Le Petit Prince by Saint-Exupéry. What can these archetypes teach us about robust experimental design? What does The Businessman, who wants to own all of the stars, but doesn’t admire their beauty, tell us about how we collect data?
Most plenaries took place at the MPI, but for Peter Hagoort’s talk on the third day we went to the research centre that he founded: the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. His talk on the toolkit for cognitive neuroscience described electrophysiological and hemodynamic methods to study language processing, and we even saw language processing happening ‘live’ in the brain! On the fourth day, Ben Ambridge from the University of Manchester delivered a talk with a very exciting message: existing, off-the-shelf methods may not be suitable for your project, so adapt them or come up with novel ones to address a research question. The final plenary was a slightly unconventional one: first, Virve Vihman, Mari Aigro and Maarja-Liisa Pilvik presented current findings of the three ongoing GoLD MEDAL research projects, after which we had a joint panel Q&A with three of MEDAL’s project leads: Virve Vihman, Caroline Rowland and Aslı Özyürek. We could ask them anything! Anything related to collaborative research projects, that is.
In addition, we also had loads of workshops to choose from. Most days we could choose from four workshops, but on the Wednesday we even had five, as we had an additional one from CLARIN ERIC ambassador Eva Soroli on the importance of research infrastructure when doing experiments. Sadly, Katie Alcock’s workshop on designing CDIs had to be cancelled, but we have good news for everyone who was looking forward to it: Katie has agreed to give her workshop online! We will keep you updated on when exactly the workshop will take place.
We are grateful to all the workshop instructors, both the local ones, as well as those who came from further way, for teaching and making the summer school the success that it was! Thank you also to everyone who presented a poster (it’s not easy!) and to everyone who helped organise the lab tours. We saw several different neuroimaging labs at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, and at the MPI we experienced the Virtual Reality and Motion Capture labs, the several different baby labs and the impressive molecular biology wet lab. Another special experience, related to the theme of multimodal language, was the visit of the muZIEum and Visio to the MPI: the muZIEum is a museum in Nijmegen that allows sighted people to experience what it is like to be blind or visually impaired, and Visio is an organisation for blind and visually impaired people. So, on the last day, we got to experience what it is like to walk around the MPI building when you can’t see: extremely difficult.
The end of the summer school was marked by a boat ride on the famous Nijmegen Pancake Boat: a boat that cruises on the Waal for an hour and a half, during which you are allowed to eat as many pancakes as you like. In our group, someone managed an impressive 8 pancakes. Though legend has it that the maximum amount of pancakes consumed by a human on that boat is 18. Keep training!
Finally, we want to announce a save the date for the third and final MEDAL Summer School! The Summer School in Computational Linguistics in Birmingham will take place 23-27 June 2025. Registration will open on November 1st 2024, follow us and stay updated. See you next year!