Thank you to all of you who participated and organised CoNSoLER 2022. 

The conference was a tremendous success! We had exceptional keynote presentations from Rasha Abdel Rahman, Panos Athanasopoulos, and Friedemann Pulvermüller, all of whom delegates have been raving about until now. We also had talks by sixteen other speakers, coming from as far as New Zealand and South-Africa, and also managed to have inspiring presentations from five speakers who gave their talk online. The slam science event was particularly entertaining and impressive, especially given the junior status of the speakers and the poster session was a huge success as well. 


We are very grateful to AMU and the faculty of English for having supported us and making this event possible. And last but not the least, we are extremely grateful to Language Learning for having sponsored CoNSoLER in preparation of the special issue of its Cognitive Neuroscience Series entitled Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Embodiment and Relativity to appear in 2024.

CoNSoLER | 2022

Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Embodiment and Relativity

Collegium Heliodori Święcicki | Grunwadzka 6 | Adam Mickiewicz University | 60-781 Poznań, Poland, October 7-9, 2022

Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Embodiment and Relativity

The idea that the language one speaks may shape the way one sees the world, captured in Benjamin Lee Whorf's linguistic relativity principle, has prompted highly contrasted views and vigorous debate amongst academics for almost a century. Theoretical linguists and psychologists, like Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker, have dismissed the idea entirely, in part because it was incompatible with the theoretical framework of Universal Grammar. Cognitive neuroscientists and experimental psychologists, like Friedemann Pülvermüller or Larry Barsalou, have embraced it as self-evident given the considerable overlap in substrates underpinning language and other cognitive functions in the human brain.

The quest for an optimal evidentiary basis to inform the debate is difficult, however, and many an experimental paradigm is often criticised on the basis that it provides insufficiently controlled stimuli or procedures to support strong conclusions. Whilst language-based studies involving overt reports and questionnaires often fail to acknowledge that they cannot test cognitive effects beyond the realm of language, testing bilinguals systematically downplays the fact that the two languages of a bilingual individual are likely active at the same time. The debate, if there is to be one, thus calls for a triangulation of approaches that test the influence of verbal representations on cognitive processes that are not readily and mandatorily meditated by language (e.g., emotion, memory, categorisation), that tap into implicit processes that are mostly unconscious rather than strategic (e.g., somatotopic activation, visual perception), and that explore developmental trajectories as well as a linguistic diversity more representative of the world's population.

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Embodiment and Relativity (CoNSoLER) conference brings together experimental linguists, psycholinguists, and cognitive neuroscientists to identify and present the most convincing evidence available to date that language is a form of embodied cognition. Contribution probing the validity and scope of the linguistic relativity principle are also welcome. CoNSoLER is held in preparation for a special issue of the Cognitive Neuroscience Series of Language Learning to appear in the Spring of 2024.

List of Topics

• Empirical studies of linguistic relativity and language embodiment
• Evidence for or theoretical account of effects of language diversity on cognition and considerations of interlingual differences
• Behavioural evidence for language - cognition interactions at any level (perceptual, attentional, affective, conceptual, decisional...)
• Neurophysiological evidence from any method (e.g., electrophysiology, in particular EEG and MEG, fMRI, NIRS, TMS, tDCS...) for effects of language representations (word, expressions, metaphors, or grammatical constructs) on cognitive processing at any level.

Types of contribution

• Oral presentations are invited or selected based on abstract evaluation conducted anonymously and following ranking. All contributors selected for an oral presentation will be invited to submit a manuscript for publication in the next Cognitive Neuroscience Series of Language Learning to appear in the Spring of 2024.
• Poster presentations are selected based on abstract evaluation conducted anonymously and following ranking. Places are limited and poster sessions are relatively sized to optimise exchanges and discussion amongst delegates.
• Slam Science presentations are selected based on abstract evaluation conducted anonymously and following ranking. These presentations will be 7 minutes long and feature 10 slides. The selected presenters will deliver them one after the other before a motivated audience in a contest format, with the best three presentations ranked based on applause meter levels receiving special prizes.

[Please indicate the types of presentation that you are interested in at the bottom of your abstract submission form – it can be any combination of the following three]. 

Special Issue of Language Learning

CoNSoLER-2022 proceedings will be published in the forms of empirical and theoretical contributions in a special issue of Langage Learning within the Cognitive Neuroscience Series (Spring 2024). All oral presentation contributors will be invited to submit a full-length manuscript (~7000 words) which will undergo editorial evaluation and review at Language Learning. Deadline for the submission of the manuscripts is 23 February 2023.