Projects

In its current funding phase, the CRC 1287 “Limits of Variability in Language” consists of 21 projects divided into four groups: Cluster B, Cluster C, Cluster D and Special Projects. You can find information on finished projects from the previous funding phases at the bottom of the page.

Cluster B

Limits of the interaction between domain-general and language-specific components in language processing and development

Cluster B aims to refine the psycholinguistic, neurocognitive, and computational models of language processing to more effectively capture the interaction between domain-general and language-specific components in language processing. It focuses on linguistic and nonlinguistic constraints that explain variability and its limits in language processing.

B01Wartenburger, Tuomainen & Ladanyi"Can individual differences in auditory motor synchrony explain individual differences in language processing across the lifespan"

B03Engbert, Rabe & Vasishth"Modeling the control of eye-movements and sentence processing"

B07Boll-Avetisyan & Engbert"Variability in infants' gaze dynamics during word recognition: Experiments and computational modeling"

B08Rabovsky, Weymar & Wartenburger"Shifting the limits of domain-specificity: Correlational and causal approaches to the P600-as-P3-hypothesis"

B09Schad & Rabovsky"How different aspects of language processing depend on attention: Variability and its limits"

Cluster C

Limits of Hidden Variability as a window into the grammar system and language acquisition

Cluster C investigate structures that are ambiguous or underspecified in some way, regarding, e.g., discourse structure and annotations, semantic interpretation, underlying (hierarchical) structure, or feature representations. We refer to this phenomenon as Hidden Variability (HV). This type of linguistic variability has so far received little attention in research on variability, which usually focuses on surface variability.

C02Zimmermann"Hidden variability and its limits in expressing meaning. A view from West African languages"

C04Gafos"A dynamical basis for the flexibility of intersegmental coordination across languages and segment types"

C05Georgi & Salzmann"(In)variability in locality constraints. Evidence from resumption"

C07Boll-Avetisyan & Gafos"(Hidden) Variability in vowel phonotactic systems"

C11Stede & Scheffler"Disagreements and their limits in discourse structure annotation: From insights to machine learning"

Cluster D

Limits of variability in language use and communication

Cluster D brings together research projects that focus on limits of variability imposed by constraints related to language use and communication. The overarching research questions of the cluster revolve around the roles played by communicative interaction and social factors of the interlocutors, including semi-artificial communication in human-machine interaction, economy or efficiency of communication, and the coexistence or contact of different sociolects and languages, including potentially biased LLM-output “varieties” in human-machine communication.

D01Schlangen"Probing the limits of prompt variability in Large Language Models"

D02Salzmann"Relatively (un)limited. The typology and comparative syntax of relative clauses revisited: Correatives, word order correlations and accessibility"

D03Fliessbach & Uth"(In)variability resumption in relative clauses: Spanish compared to other Romance languages"

D04Pfeiffer"Dialect acquisition in different sociolinguistic contexts: Limits of variability in Alemannic and Pomeranian"

D05Seržant"Limits of variability in the complexity of valency class systems"