The 2026 SLATE Research Symposium will be held on May 7, 2025 (Reading Day), College of Education, Room 22
The Symposium will run from 10am to 2pm, including a poster session for student research (11:30-1:00) and boxed lunches for all attendees.
POSTER ABSTRACT SUBMISSION -- NOW OPEN!
DEADLINE: APRIL 10, 2026
Submission Process:
- Email <kiel@illinois.edu> with your poster abstract: 500-word limit
- Include: Name & Email, Department, & Advisor Name
- Indicate whether your poster will be a traditional printed poster or computer-poster
- If Traditional, we will print your poster for you!
- Professor Christianson will inform you whether or not your abstract is suitable for the symposium.
- Deadline for emailing Professor Christianson the final poster for printing: 5pm, April 30, 2026
- ALL PRESENTERS must REGISTER for the Symposium. (Registration form will be emailed to all SLATE Student listserv members in April.)
Schedule:
10:00 -- Welcome
10:15 -- Dr. Giuli Dussias's talk
11:15 -- set-up for poster session (posters will be hung up already)/lunch
11:30 -- Lunch/Poster Session
1:00 -- Dr. Xun Yan's Talk
2:00 -- Closing Remarks
Speakers:
Our invited speaker this year is Dr. Paola (Giuli) Dussias, Distinguished Professor of Spanish, Linguistics, and Psychology, Pennsylvania State University
TITLE: Variation in Predictive Language Processing
ABSTRACT: Our understanding of prediction in language comprehension has advanced rapidly, but key questions remain about the mechanisms that give rise to predictive processing and how these mechanisms are shaped by variation across individuals, languages, and contexts. Evidence increasingly shows that prediction is not uniform: it depends on experience, cognitive resources, and the structure of the input, raising important questions about how it interacts with integration under different conditions.
In this talk, I bring together evidence from four lines of research to argue that variation provides critical insights into the complementary roles of prediction and integration. First, I employ the allophonic alternation between the English indefinite articles a/an to show that predictive processing is experience-dependent, with systematic differences between native and non-native speakers. Second, I use evidence from the processing of the Italian definite articles il/lo/la to show that prediction is language-specific, with listeners anticipating both phonological and morphosyntactic information within a rich grammatical system. Third, I examine code-switching, drawing on experimental and naturalistic data to show that in mixed-language contexts –where predictability is reduced –predictions are less precise and comprehension relies more heavily on rapid and flexible integration across linguistic systems. Fourth, I investigate the role of literacy in shaping predictive processing, drawing on recent work with low-income Afro-Colombian speakers.
Taken together, the findings support a view of language processing in which prediction and integration are complementary, adaptive mechanisms whose relative contributions shift with experience, linguistic structure, and context. Adopting a variation perspective highlights the flexibility of the human language processing system and advances theoretical accounts of prediction in real-world comprehension.
Our Illinois speaker this year will be Dr. Xun Yan, Professor of Linguistics
TITLE: What does elicited imitation measure? A synthesis of psychometric, corpus, and psycholinguistic evidences
Abstract: Elicited imitation (EI) is considered as a type of general language proficiency task, and yet its use as a measure of second language (L2) proficiency is controversial with a unique trajectory of popularity over the past 50 years. This talk is a reflection of EI-related research and practice across four historical stages, from (1) the initial adaptation from first language acquisition research, through (2) the debate on construct validity, to (3) the loss of popularity to communicative movement, until (4) the recent resurgence of interest in the technology-advanced era. I will first synthesize research findings on some critical questions raised on the nature of EI as a proficiency measure across different stages. Next, I will discuss implications of this measure in other fields of applied linguistics, propose new lines of research, and illustrate the potential of this method of assessment through some of my recent work. In the end, I will extrapolate beyond EI to share some personal views on the use of psycholinguistic vs. communicative tasks in measuring language proficiency in applied linguistics. By combining historical review and empirical research, I hope that the talk will provide a comprehensive account on the “seasonality” of attention on such a resilient measure of L2 proficiency. Through decades of EI research, while answers to some lingering questions remain inconclusive, advancements in cognitive psychology and technology have also broaden the scope and reshaped the foci of research around this method of assessment.
