Mayfest 2026: Production
Mayfest is a workshop that brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss fundamental issues in linguistics.
Mayfest 2026 will take place on May 29 and 30 at the University of Maryland College Park.
The theme of this year’s workshop is language production, viewed from formal, experimental, neurobiological and evolutionary perspectives. What are the data structures that support fluent production? What cognitive processes underlie their use? And what are the evolutionary, neurobiological, and developmental origins of our production abilities? We welcome nine scholars from diverse fields to discuss their views on these and related questions.
Speakers
Josh Armstrong / Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of California Los Angeles
Matt Goldrick / Professor, Linguistics, Northwestern University
Arella Gussow / Visiting Assistant Professor, Psychology, University of Richmond
Jonah Katz / Associate Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
William Matchin / Associate Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Carolina
Scott Nelson / Assistant Professor, Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bonnie Nozari / Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University
Virginia Valian / Distinguished Professor, Psychology, Hunter College
Agustin Vicente / Professor, Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (EHU)
Friday May 29
Session 1: Orchestrating production
Speakers: Virginia Valian, William Matchin, Bonnie Nozari
What processes are responsible for selecting and integrating different elements of production? How do different elements get prioritized in the course of production? How are weights, routine, and defaults established and adjusted? How can we disentangle the impact of grammatical knowledge and extra-linguistic systems on production?
Session 2: Coordination of representations on the way to speaking
Speakers: Jonah Katz, Matthew Goldrick, Scott Nelson
How do different representational formats that are necessary for possibly different linguistic systems (syntax, phonology, prosody, meaning, etc.) interact during speech production? How are representations shaped by the temporal and cognitive pressures of real-time utterance? What structural properties must representations have in order to support speech? What formats do representations have to conform to in order to support speech? Are there common organizational principles across language production and other kinds of actions (e.g. music/dance, motor control)?
Saturday May 30
Session 3: From thinking to speaking
Speakers: Josh Armstrong, Agustin Vicente, Arella Gussow
How does the language production system translate prelinguistic thought into linguistic form? Which aspects of thought are systematically excluded or filtered during translation to language? How does language production differ from non-linguistic forms of communication? How incremental is message development in real-time production? How complete must a conceptual message be to enable linguistic encoding and articulation? What is the relationship between communicative intent and the specific propositional content a speaker chooses to express?