Welcome to GALANA 2021!

Please notice! Registered participants should have gotten an email with Zoom links for the conference. If you have registered for the conference but not received any information please contact Tinna (tinnafj@hi.is) or Sigríður (galana2020@hi.is).

Please join us for the 9th bi-annual conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America (GALANA 2021) on May 7-9, 2021, hosted virtually by the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Iceland.

Please notice!

Due to COVID-19, the GALANA-9 conference which was scheduled to take place in Reykjavík, Iceland on August 21-23, 2020 was postponed.

We were hoping to be able to host the conference in Reykjavík on August 20-22, 2021 in a hybrid format. Unfortunately, it now looks like August this year is a bit too early even only for a partly in-person conference, since the number of new cases is still high in many countries and the vaccination process slower than anticipated. Also, we cannot postpone the conference any longer since we had already sent out notifications of acceptance of talks and posters before the pandemic hit, and we have to honor our selection. For some involved, e.g. graduating Ph.D. students, it is important that the conference takes place very soon, since they are now finishing their studies and applying for jobs.

Thus, we have decided that GALANA-9 will be hosted online this coming May 7-9. Talks will be presented live via Zoom and poster sessions will take place on Gather. We are all very disappointed because one of the motivations for hosting the conference here was to welcome you all to Iceland, with all its natural wonders and sights in the summer. Hopefully, you will have another opportunity to visit Iceland in the near future.

We regret that it has come to this and we are sorry for the inconvenience. However, we are looking forward to an interesting and joyful virtual meeting with all of you on May 7-9.

Best wishes,

On behalf of the GALANA 9 organizing committee,

Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir
Professor of Icelandic Linguistics
University of Iceland
e-mail: galana2020@hi.is

About GALANA

The GALANA conference features theoretically informed research on all types of language acquisition scenarios, including (but not limited to) monolingual first language acquisition, bilingual/multilingual first language acquisition, second language acquisition by children as well as adults, third language acquisition, acquisition of signed as well as spoken languages, language disorders, language acquisition in the presence of cognitive impairment and autism, the development of pidgins and creoles, and language attrition.

Invited speakers

Dr. Nina Hyams
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Title: Children’s Sluices: Intervention and Evasion

Dr. Marit Westergaard
The Arctic University of Norway (UiT)
Title: Micro-variation in Multilingual Situations and the Importance of Property-by-Property Acquisition

Dr. Sudha Arunachalam
New York University (NYU)
Title: How characteristics of the learner and the language being learned shape the lexical acquisition process

See more information about the invited speakers here.