18th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
College welcomes 140 linguists from across the globe
The 18th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition took place at Murray Edwards College on 16-18 April 2026. College Fellow in Linguistics and DoS Dr Dora Alexopoulou, Chair of the organising committee, organised the conference in collaboration with her colleagues at the Dept of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, MMLL and AMES. Professor Charles Forsdick, Professorial Fellow at Murray Edwards and Drapers Professor of French and co-Chair of MMLL, opened the conference, welcoming all delegates to Cambridge and the College and highlighting the value of collaboration between linguistics and modern languages for the deeper understanding of language - this fundamental ability that makes us human.
Dr Dora Alexopoulou said:
“Language remains the biggest mystery of human cognition, intertwined with our thought and creativity as a species. Our multilingual capacity, our ability to learn and to speak multiple languages across our lifespan, holds important cues to this mystery while vital for cross-cultural communication.”
140 linguists from around the world gathered at Murray Edwards for three days between 16-18 of April to uncover the mysteries of language learning, asking: What is common and what differs when learning languages as diverse as English, Turkish, Thai, Arabic or Manoki, an endagered Amazonian language spoken in Brazil? How does being bilingual from birth differ from acquiring languages later in life? What insights of linguistic theory and empirical research in second language acquisition can we bring to the foreign language classroom? What can we contribute to the language of heritage and migrant communities and efforts of revitalisation and preservation of endangered languages around the world? What insights can we gain by exploring our rich learner language datasets with data science methods and tools?