South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL) 2025
The sixth edition of the South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL) will be held between 17-19 November 2025 at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The conference will provide a platform for the exchange of research on sentence processing, computational modelling, corpus-based psycholinguistics, neurobiology of language, and child language acquisition, among others, in the context of the subcontinent's linguistic landscape.
South Asia constitutes an ideal natural laboratory for psycholinguistic investigation. The region is home to over 600 languages representing the Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, and Austroasiatic language families as well as isolates, small families, and several pidgins and creoles (Borin, Saxena, Comrie, & Virk, 2021). The populations speaking SA languages are typically multilingual (Annamalai, 2008) and about two dozen writing systems are represented throughout the region (Asher, 2008). The SAFAL conference will bring together researchers investigating South Asian languages to exchange ideas on different domains of psycholinguistic inquiry including language acquisition, language processing, multilingualism, and literacy development.
The conference will be held in hybrid modality, allowing remote participation for registered conference attendees who are unable to attend in person at the University of Colorado Boulder in November 2025. There are no conference registration fees and a limited number of travel bursaries are available for students whose abstracts are accepted as talks for in-person presentation.
The 2025 conference will include:
State-of-the-art perspectives presented by six invited speakers on the following key themes:
- First language acquisition
- Language Processing
- Multilingualism
- Literacy
Tutorial sessions led by prominent experts on:
- The documentation of child language in diverse communities
- The processing of language in children with typical and atypical development.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation
Abstract Submissions
In order to allow for lengthy visa processing times for scholars from South Asia, abstracts will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting more than a year in advance.
▪ Abstract submissions open: 2 October, 2024
▪ Abstract submission deadline: 31 August, 2025
▪ Acceptance notification: at least 2 weeks after submission of your abstract
We invite abstract submissions for short talks and virtual poster presentations on a broad range of topics including:
• first language acquisition and multilingualism
• language production
• language comprehension
• language-cognition interactions
• literacy development and written language processing
• language disorders
• corpus-based and computational psycholinguistics
• neurobiology of language
and all other areas of psycholinguistics in the context of the subcontinent’s linguistic landscape.
Online presentation of accepted abstracts is possible if you are unable to travel to Boulder.
You can upload your abstracts by clicking the "Submissions" button below.
Invited Speakers
Research Presentations
Samar Husain, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Dr. Husain’s research is primarily relevant to the theme of language processing. He is interested in language comprehension and production. From the comprehension perspective, he is interested in uncovering the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processing. With regard to sentence production, he is interested in understanding planning processes for various aspects of a sentence (e.g., argument role/case assignment, agreement, word order, etc.) during spontaneous speech. In addition, he is interested in understanding if (and to what extent) language is shaped by processing/functional pressures. His research group investigates these themes (with a special focus on South-Asian languages) using behavioral, corpus-based as well as computational methods.
Ramesh Mishra, University of Hyderabad
Dr. Mishra’s research ties in with the themes of literacy and multilingualism. His interdisciplinary expertise spans action control, attention, vision and language and individual differences. Dr. Mishra has used neuroimaging techniques to examine the effect of literacy in the non-alphabetic SA script, Devanagari, on functional connectivity and cerebral responses to speech. He has also investigated the role of formal literacy in influencing Hindi speakers’ abilities to generate lexical predictions with facilitative effects on other cognitive activities such as spoken language mediated eye gaze. His work on bilingualism includes, among others, studies on how Malayalam-English bilinguals modulate their cognitive control settings in the presence of different interlocutors, as well as the role of language proficiency in enhancing oculomotor control in proficient Hindi-English bilinguals.
Sonali Nag, Oxford University
Dr. Nag’s work is primarily relevant to the themes of language acquisition and literacy. Dr. Nag investigates child learning within diverse settings. Her research is comparative with a focus on languages, writing systems, cultural settings, and levels of socio economic status. She uses a wide variety of methods including surveys in schools and home settings, child assessments, corpora analysis, secondary data analysis, and narrative reviews. Dr. Nag has worked extensively on the languages of South Asia and how children master the scripts of the region. She has conducted studies on literacy development in multilingual India, focusing on Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, and English. Since 2020, she has been working with collaborators on interventions that can support children’s oral language development.
Savithry Namboodiripad, University of Michigan
Dr. Namboodiripad’s work is relevant to the themes of language processing and multilingualism. Her research uses experimental methods to explore syntactic typology, particularly in the domain of constituent order (as well as in the realm of variation in island phenomena). Dr. Namboodiripad also investigates ways of characterizing multilingualism and how languages change when they come into contact. She is particularly interested in multilingual decolonial and immigrant contexts, with a focus on Malayalam.
Vaijayanthi Sarma, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Dr. Sarma’s research addresses the theme of language acquisition. Her research interests encompass syntactic theory, language acquisition, fieldwork on endangered languages (specifically Dravidian minority languages) combined with preservation efforts, neuro cognitive research on language, areal typological features, and reconstruction. She has published on a variety of topics including complex predicates in Indian languages, null arguments in Malayalam and Telugu wh-questions, and case, word order, and agreement in the syntax and acquisition of Tamil.
Jyotsna Vaid, Texas A&M University
Dr. Vaid's work addresses the themes of literacy and multilingualism. Using a comparative, crosslinguistic approach, her research examines the cognitive and linguistic impact of properties of specific languages (e.g., evidentiality) and properties of writing systems (e.g., script directionality) and variability in when and how languages were acquired by bilinguals, as well as the impact of formal and informal translation experience. Dr. Vaid has published extensively on the cognitive and neural bases of bilingualism. Her work on the role of the two cerebral hemispheres in bilingual language processing has shown that early onset of bilingualism is associated with more bilateral involvement in language, in contrast to the greater left hemisphere dominance for language among single language users. She has also published on sentence comprehension in bilingual aphasia in Hindi-English and Kannada-English users, and how orthographic characteristics affect word recognition in biscriptal users of Hindi and Urdu.
Tutorial Presentations
The documentation of child language in diverse communities
Shanley Allen, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
Dr. Allen’s research investigates how crosslinguistic differences in morphosyntactic structure affect first language development, universal vs. language-specific aspects of language, and the interaction and mutual influence of the two languages of a bilingual or second language speaker. Her work employs a variety of methods including naturalistic observation, elicited production, self-paced reading, and eye tracking. Her work focuses especially on the acquisition of morphosyntactic structures in Inuktitut (Eskimo), discourse-pragmatic effects on argument realization in Inuktitut and English, and the acquisition of speech and gesture related to motion events in English, Japanese, and Turkish. Dr. Allen also investigates cross-linguistic influence during sentence processing in Inuktitut-English, German-English, Spanish-English, and Basque Spanish bilinguals.
Language processing in children with typical and atypical development.
Sudha Arunachalam, New York University
Dr. Arunachalam examines how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers acquire their native language. She studies children who are developing typically, children with autism spectrum disorder, and children with language delay. In collaborations with researchers all over the world, she has studied children who are acquiring languages other than English, including Turkish and Korean. She is particularly interested in the learning mechanisms underlying language acquisition and in how caregiver-child interactions support learning. This interdisciplinary work integrates insights from the fields of communication disorders, linguistics, and cognitive and developmental psychology, and it involves several behavioral methods with a focus on eye-tracking.
Local Organizing Committee
- Sudha Arunachalam, New York University
- Albert Kim, University of Colorado Boulder
- Bhuvana Narasimhan, University of Colorado Boulder
Contact E-mail: safal.boulder.2025@gmail.com
SAFAL Program Committee
Sakshi Bhatia, University of Delhi
Dustin A. Chacón, University of California Santa Cruz
Kamal Choudhary, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar
Brian W. Dillon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Samar Husain, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Dave Kush, University of Toronto
Aditi Lahiri, University of Oxford
Savithry Namboodiripad, University of Michigan
P.R. Rajakrishnan, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad
Vaijayanthi Sarma, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Narayanan Srinivasan, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Ashwini Vaidya, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Shravan Vasishth, University of Potsdam
Heather Winskel, James Cook University, Singapore
Eva Wittenberg, Central European University