Language and Aging Research

Local host: Míša Hejná, Aarhus Universitet

Upcoming. Details to be announced.

Documents

Local host: Lihe Huang, Tongji University, Shanghai

Negotiating Age-related Changes

Hosted by Tongji University in a hybrid in-person and online format. The conference invites contributions from corpus linguistics, multimodal communication, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics, including emerging AI tools. The focus is on how language use changes in later life and how linguistic, cognitive, and interactional challenges related to aging are managed across diverse communicative settings.

Conference website / Documents

Local host: Harald Baayen, Universität Tübingen

Hosted by the University of Tübingen, in the Alte Aula. Themes: language use in later life across psycho-, neuro- and sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics, psychology, sociology, healthcare and nursing; language contact across the lifespan; and interactional studies of language and aging, including discourse, communication and dementia.

Conference website / Documents

Local host: David Bowie, University of Alaska Anchorage

Aging in the context of rurality and indigeneity

Hosted by the University of Alaska Anchorage, with the option of in-person participation or virtual participation via livestreaming. The conference followed previous events in Louvain-la-Neuve (2014 and 2015), Berlin (2017), and Helsinki (2019), aiming to better identify the position of language and aging research within linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, in cooperation with gerontology, psychology, sociology, nursing, social work, and economics.

Conference website / Documents

Local host: Camilla Lindholm, Helsingin Yliopisto

Interaction, Methods, and Positions

Hosted by the University of Helsinki. Given the active research environment in aging and interaction in the Nordic countries, interaction was a central theme, alongside methods and positions. The interaction session focused on naturally occurring spoken interaction involving older adults, both with and without pathological neurobiological language change. The methods session opened a discussion of empirical approaches and innovative methods, including corpus, audio and video data, as well as the related ethical issues. The positions session gathered position papers on what language and aging research can offer to, and learn from, neighbouring disciplines.

Conference website / Documents

Local host: Annette Gerstenberg, Freie Universität Berlin

Encounters in Language and Aging Research: Pragmatic Spaces, Longitudinal Studies and Multilingualism

Hosted by Freie Universität Berlin (Fabeckstraße 23 to 25, Holzlaube). This was the first academic event of the CLARe network outside Louvain, aimed at institutionalising the exchange between participating disciplines and countries. The three thematic strands were pragmatic spaces (verbal and nonverbal communication in later life, including pragmatic and discourse markers, stance-taking, intergenerational encounters and care settings), longitudinal studies (real-time language change and age-grading, indicators of healthy and pathological aging, the sane-pathological continuum in dementia), and multiple identities and multilingualism in later life (language preferences, borrowing, attrition, code-switching, multilingual care settings). Round tables addressed healthcare and methods in language and aging research.

Programme and abstracts / Documents

Local host: Catherine Bolly, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve

Language Use in Later Life

International research workshop hosted by the University of Louvain. With leading experts in the field, the workshop focused on the theoretical implications of empirical work in CLARe projects, with the aim of developing the outlines of future collaboration in linguistics and aging. The academic programme combined programmatic keynotes, the presentation of doctoral projects, data sessions (speech, gesture and Sign Language corpus data), and round tables on the most urgent research desiderata and the planning of joint future research projects.

Archive / Documents

Local host: Catherine Bolly, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve

Communicating with elderly people. What about their language in use? / Communiquer avec la personne âgée. Regards croisés sur l'usage langagier de nos aînés

Inaugural workshop of the CLARe network, hosted by UCLouvain (room SOCR25) and organised by the centre Valibel - Discours et Variation. The day combined linguistic corpus-based approaches with neuropsychological, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives on the language of older adults, in both healthy and pathological aging. A closing round table identified priority axes of future research in the language sciences that re-position the aging individual and their wellbeing at the centre of inquiry.

Archive / Documents