An opportunity to delve deeper into the psychology of language
The BCBL research centre is bringing the AMLaP international congress to Donostia for the first time, with experts from all over the world on the cognitive mechanisms associated with language processing.
In its 29th edition, 430 participants are expected to attend from 31 August to 2 September in the Kursaal Auditorium in a programme with more than 350 presentations and talks.
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, director of the language neuroscience laboratory at New York University, is one of the main guest speakers at the forum.
Language and the processes and ways of communicating are evolving as a result of both social changes and the emergence of new technologies and tools such as ChatGPT. Therefore, psycholinguistics, which is responsible for analysing language acquisition and the cognitive mechanisms involved in its processing, is also continually advancing to adapt to the new ways of communication.
With the aim of presenting and exploring the main advances being made in the field of the psychology of language, the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) is bringing the AMLaP (Architectures And Mechanisms For Language Processing) international conference to Donostia for the first time.
Specifically, the 29th edition of the annual event, which will be held for the third time in its history in Spain and for the second time in the Basque Country, will bring together experts from all over the world in the cognitive architectures and mechanisms associated with language processing at the Kursaal Auditorium from 31 August to 2 September.
“We are expecting around 430 attendees, researchers from all over the world, in a programme of more than 350 presentations and talks to offer new psychological, computational and theoretical perspectives related to the psychology of language in all its forms: written, oral or gestural,” explains Manuel Carreiras, scientific director of the BCBL and leader of the scientific committee and organiser of AMLaP 2023.
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
Among all the experts attending the forum, the Basque psycholinguist and director of the language neuroscience laboratory at the University of New York, Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, whose opening lecture on Friday 1 September will be followed by a symposium on “The bilingual brain”, stands out.
After studying at the University of Deusto and the BCBL, where she did her master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language, Blanco-Elorrieta obtained her PhD in Psychology in 2022 at New York University and in the last three years she has been accumulating different merits and awards.
For example, in 2020 she was selected by Forbes magazine as one of the 30 most influential people under the age of 30 in the scientific field; and her doctoral thesis, “Towards an ecologically valid neuroscience of bilingualism”, has received prestigious awards from the Cognitive Science Society and New York University.
In his research, he combines the knowledge of monolingual and multilingual individuals, who process language through speech or sign language, to address an inclusive and comprehensive neurobiology of language. To do so, he combines neuroimaging data, computational and behavioural methods with theoretical insights from linguistics, psychology and neuroscience.
In addition to Blanco-Elorrieta, the San Sebastian edition of AMLaP will also feature presentations by Professor Victor Ferreira from the University of San Diego, Professor and researcher Vitória Piai from the Radbound University of Nijmegen (Netherlands), and Ikerbasque researcher and leader of the “Computational Neuroscience” group at the BCBL, James Magnuson.
