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🧠 Can We Learn to Speak in Unusual Ways? A Peek into Language Experiments at the Night of Science

🧠 Can We Learn to Speak in Unusual Ways? A Peek into Language Experiments at the Night of Science

On May 9, 2015, our research group (project P1) participated in the Night of Science, an exciting public event hosted by the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau to make scientific research accessible to a wider audience. We presented hands-on experiments focusing on how both monolingual and bilingual children and adults process uncommon or even ungrammatical sentences. We designed interactive games where members of the public could participate directly and experience how subtle influences can affect their own use of language.

How do children learn language rules—and how does acquisition drive long-term linguistic change?

How do children learn language rules—and how does acquisition drive long-term linguistic change?

The TSP Workshop with Charles Yang

These were the guiding questions of our two-day SILPAC workshop on the Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles (TSP), held on 7 and 9 May 2025. The event brought together early-career and senior researchers across the SILPAC network to engage directly with one of the most influential theories of language acquisition and change, as developed by our DFG Mercator Fellow, Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania).

The first day featured a series of concise but thought-provoking online talks, each applying the TSP to a different historical puzzle. From the loss of prefixes in English to the restructuring of verb classes in French, speakers explored the interface of learnability and diachronic change and offered rich empirical coverage—from dative-marking to verb-particle constructions.