Language Science Day 2026

We want Language Science Day to be accessible for everyone. You can request specific additional accommodations when you register, or by emailing lsc@umd.edu (please use the subject line “LANGUAGE SCIENCE DAY ACCOMMODATION REQUEST”). 

• ASL interpretation will be available throughout the day. **If you need ASL interpretation, please register and let us know by September 6 at the latest!**
• Automatic closed captioning will be displayed during panel discussions.
• There is a gender-neutral restroom on the same floor as the event.
• There is a lactation room on the same floor as the event (key available upon request from the Information Desk).
• We will post directions for a wheel-accessible route to the event spaces from the main Stamp entrances and the visitor parking garage.
• Click here for an event sensory guide with room descriptions.

From Union Lane Garage, cross Union Lane to enter Stamp through the southwest entrance. This entrance is between the ground floor and first floor (“SW” on the elevator buttons). You can either take the stairs straight up to the second floor, or take the elevator (go through the door directly to the right after you come inside). 

From the main entrance: Turn right after the info desk, and the elevator/stairs will be on the right. Go up to the second floor. 

The closest visitor parking is at Union Lane Garage. As a backup, the next closest is Regents Drive Garage. Note that you will need to pay for parking when you arrive, and you will need your license plate number at the pay station. Information about visitor parking is available on the UMD Transportation Services website. 

If you have an ADA parking tag, you are allowed to park in any available ADA parking spot on campus. There are some ADA spots on the surface-level Union Lane Garage, but they may be full by noon. 

You can also reach UMD on public transportation. College Park Station is served by the DC Metro green/yellow line and the MARC Camden Line. 

Research on aphasia (language impairment following brain injury) sits at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and clinical practice. Panelists will discuss how their research addresses cognitive models of language and their neural implementation, and how patients experience recovery. 

Panelists:

• Yasmeen Faroqi Shah (UMD, Hearing and Speech Sciences)
• Brenda Rapp (Johns Hopkins, Cognitive Science)
• Peter Turkeltaub (Georgetown, Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine)

Moderator: Bob Slevc (UMD, Psychology)

Panelists will discuss their work on bilingual language and brain development in communities often left out of developmental research, and explore how diversity informs our understanding of “typical” development. 

Panelists:

• Rachel Romeo (UMD, Human Development)
• Noelani Kong-Johnson (Georgetown, Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery)
• Leher Singh (University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Psychology)

Moderator: Jessica Nolasco (UMD, Hearing and Speech Sciences)

A panel of Deaf faculty and students at UMD and Gallaudet reflects on their past and current experiences of language access, and what hearing researchers should know about deafness and Deaf culture. 

Panelists:

• Jill Bradbury (UMD, School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies)
• Brittany Farr (UMD, Applied Linguistics & Language Education)
• Michael Dunham (UMD, Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education)
• Gregoire Youbara (Gallaudet, World Languages and Cultures)

Moderators: Deborah Chen Pichler (Gallaudet, Linguistics) and Tonia Bleam (UMD, Linguistics)

Room: Colony Ballroom

1. Assessment at Home: Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to Understand Daily Experiences in Child Language Development
Jennifer Magnuson, Jake Frischmann, Odesé Imhienintama, Rachel Romeo (UMD Human Development and Quantitative Methodology)

3. Lesion Correlates of Continued Aphasia Recovery in the Chronic Stroke
Elizabeth HT Chang (Georgetown University)

5. Hand in hand: Exploring emotion and language processing in ASL/English
Christina Kim, Rachel Sortino, Ash Gerlach, Ty Willey, Onudeah Nicolarakis, Shilpa Hanumantha Lacy, Rachel Pizzie (Gallaudet University)

7. Tell Me More: Preliminary Evidence for Longitudinal Benefits of Caregivers' Verbal Elaborations in Infancy
Izzy Ford (University of Delaware, Linguistics and Cognitive Science)

9. He Who Must Not Be Named (Yet): Sustained Anterior Negativity May Index Active Cataphor Processing
Alba Jorquera Jiménez de Aberásturi, Jackson Confer, Philip Resnik, Ellen Lau (UMD Linguistics)

11. Protactile: The Tactile Language Emerging in the DeafBlind Community
Lyn Eaton, Leah Rhead (Gallaudet University)

13. Ripple: An AI Co-Writing Tool to Improve Text Understandability through Multi-Level Cohesion
Kimberly Do (UMD College of Information)

15. Investigating Time of Day and Chronotype Effects on Speech Perception
Gerald Tabe (UMD College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences)

17. Escaping the Nash Trap: Structural Estimation and Alignment of Strategic Reasoning in Large Language Models
Jiannan Xu (UMD Smith School of Business)

19. Inside the Reading System: From Word to Text and in a Second Language
Jessica Sishi Fei, Min Wang (UMD Human Development and Quantitative Methodology)

21. The phenomenology of image-less, word-less thought
Jacob Isolda (American University)

23. From Sequence to Structure: Hierarchical Orthographic Learning in L2
Yi Dai, Min Wang, Xianglin Zhang (UMD Human Development and Quantitative Methodology)

25. L2 Learning With or Without AI: Do Immediate and Delayed Results Tell the Same Story? A Multilevel Meta-Analysis
Shinah Ryu, Mina Song (UMD Second Language Acquisition)

27. Language Modeling via Next Feature Prediction
Junghyun Min (Georgetown University)

29. Function words as statistical cues for language learning
Xiulin Yang, Heidi Getz, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox (Georgetown University)

31. Variation and Change in the Metapragmatic Imaginary
Michael Israel (UMD English)

Room: Colony Ballroom

2. How Noise and Accent Affect Children’s Verbal Working Memory
Carmen Parada (UMD Hearing and Speech Sciences)

4. A Corpus-based Analysis of Morphosyntactic Variation in African American English
Brittany Lee-Bey (George Mason University)

6. Grapheme-to-Phoneme Consistency Predicts Real Word Reading Pronunciations
Aditi Mohapatra (UMD Neuroscience)

8. A contralesional right hemisphere does not generally become more left hemisphere-like after stroke
Trevor K. M. Day, Natalya Vladyko (Georgetown University)

10. Is More Information Better? Motor-Sequence Information in Handwriting Learning
Xianglin Zhang, Min Wang, Yi Dai, Bronson Hui (UMD Human Development and Quantitative Methodology; Second Language Acquisition)

12. EmoPair: A New Paradigm for Measuring Emotional Affect
Michael Leon Chrzan, Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy, Anika Alam, Bin Hu, Wenjing Gao, Jing Liu (Center for Educational Data Science and Innovation; UMD Computer Science; Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership)

14. Unpacking the human algorithm
Utku Turk, Carmen Tang, London Dixon, Allison Dods, Alba Jorquera, Sebastian Mancha, Sathvik Nair, and Colin Phillips (UMD Linguistics)

16. Languages of Healing: How Survivors of Gender-Based Violence Leverage Multilingualism to Contribute to Collective Healing
Diana Purwaningrum (UMD Applied Linguistics and Language Education)

18. Out of order: L1 effects and LLM surprisal in L2 English reading
Nina Dukic (Georgetown University)

20. The First Ten Words: Sources of variation and consistency
Megan Pham, Leher Singh (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

22. One, Two or 1, 2? Statistical Learning Across Different Number Formats
Matthew Chung, Daphne Saatcioglu, Harry Mayilsamy, Asel Tabaldieva, Rhea Krishnan, Emely Rivas, Mine Muezzinoglu (UMD Neuroscience and Cognitive Science)

24. How strong is the Stroop Effect in L2 compared with L1? Evidence from Farsi – English Bilinguals
Manizha Davlatova (UMD Second Language Acquisition)

26. Turn by turn: Classifying utterances in a conversation can help detect topics
Sorrah Edwards-Thro (UMD Hearing and Speech Sciences)

28. ClearMind: The Ramp for ADHD and Dyslexia
Hargun Malhotra (TRAILS)

30. The Effects of Language Mixing in Bilingual People with Aphasia
Andre Guadalupe (UMD Hearing and Speech Sciences)

Sign up to present a poster here by September 6.

Posters are a great opportunity to discuss your research with faculty and students across departments. The poster sessions are typically the most attended part of Language Science Day, with 100-120 attendees across two sessions. 

You can present about a specific project (past, present, or future), your overall research program, or how your research has developed over time. Regardless of the scope, it’s important to make your work comprehensible to a broad audience from different departments. 

Poster Competition

A poster competition will be held at Language Science Day, with cash prizes for the top posters. Only UMD affiliates are eligible for the competition. Judging will be based on how well key points are conveyed through design and presentation, as well as visual accessibility and clarity.

Full details and the scoring rubric will be posted by August 31. To be eligible, final posters must be submitted by 11:59 PM on Tuesday, September 15.

Poster Design Workshop • September 3

Need help designing your poster? Join the first Language Science Lunch Talk, a workshop on poster design and presentation.

• When: September 3 at 12:30 PM (lunch served at 12:15 PM)
• Where: Language Science Center (2130 H.J. Patterson Hall).

The workshop will discuss design principles for creating visually effective posters and how to use them as a foundation for dialogue and to engage your audience

Free Printing

Submit your poster to the Language Science Center by 11:59 PM on Tuesday, September 15, and it will be printed and brought to the event for you. Self-printing is also available at the Language Science Center. Detailed instructions will be sent out the week before the event.