Keynote speakers

ANASTASIO Simona. The title of her plenary lecture is: Challenges in the L2 acquisition of motion event construal. Where are we now?

Simona Anastasio is member of the UMR 7023 SFL CNRS and associate member of the UMR8163 STL CNRS of the University of Lille. She hold a Phd in Language Sciences (Contrastive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition) from the University of Paris 8 and the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ within a cotutelle agreement. She is also member of the GIS Réseau Acquisition des Langues seconds (RéAL2) and member of the scientific committee of the International Society of Applied Psycholinguistics (ISAPL). She is currently employed as a fixed-term instructor in Linguistics and Language Learning (L2 French) at the University of Lille.

Her main research interests focus on inter-/intra-typological variation across languages and its impact on second language acquisition by adults in terms of cross-linguistic influence. In particular, she explores how the preferred patterns in different languages (typologically close or distant) influence the ways in which we verbalize events, namely motion events, during SLA, by means of corpora analysis. She has recently considered a concrete interface between SLA and language learning: she aims at assessing the potential benefits of some pedagogical strategies in the teaching of motion event construal in L2 Italian classroom, where Italian verb-particle constructions are often neglected by instructors and as, a result, extremely scarce in learners’ interlanguage. Besides the interest in motion event construal, Simona Anastasio have also studied the use of verb-morphology and discourse markers in L2 Italian by immigrants.

***

FLECKEN Monique. The title of her plenary lecture is: Event construal in L1 and L2: linguistic and cognitive perspectives.

Monique Flecken is a psycho-/neurolinguist and her experimental research explores the relation between language and cognition. In particular, she investigates how the specific language(s) that we use influence(s) the way in which we perceive, understand, describe and memorize events. Her work focuses on linguistic variation in event description and crosslinguistic research, contrasting languages with different lexical/grammatical means to describe events.

Monique Flecken did her PhD on language production in early bilinguals, in Heidelberg, Germany (PhD in Linguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 2010). Then, she did a postdoc at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (Radboud University Nijmegen, NL), after which she worked as a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen for a number of years. Since 2021, she is an Assistant Professor at the Dept of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.

 ***

GONZALEZ Paz. The title of her plenary lecture is: Germanic L1 Transfer in Aspectual Representations: the Spanish Interlanguage.

 

Paz González (Ph.D., Utrecht University, The Netherlands) is University Lecturer at Leiden University (The Netherlands), where she teaches Linguistics at the Departments of Latin American Studies, International Studies and Linguistics. She is a member of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and editor of DuJAL (Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics). The goal of her research is to understand how TAM (Tense, Aspect and Modality) systems work within SLA and Language Variation fields, combining  three linguistic disciplines: a description of TAM systems, and two applications in real language use: its acquisition in a second language and its use at micro and macro variation levels. She has published in journals such as Modern Language Journal, International Review of Applied Linguistics, Isogloss and Spanish in Context.

***

McMANUS Kevin. The title of his plenary lecture is: Crosslinguistic influence and the second language learning of tense-aspect systems.

Kevin McManus (PhD, Newcastle University) is the Gilbert R. Watz Early Career Professor in Language and Linguistics and an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is also director of the Center for Language Acquisition and co-director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research. His research uses experimental, corpus, and replication designs to investigate how we learn, process, and use second languages, particularly the development of grammatical knowledge and how cognitive and environmental factors shape that knowledge. His work in these areas has been published in the field's leading journals, including Applied Linguistics, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. His most recent book is titled Crosslinguistic Influence and Second Language Learning (Routledge 2022).
For more information, see: http://mcmanuskevin.com/