Linguistic Society of America names awardees for Best Paper in Language 2023

21 October 2022
Linguistic Society of America names awardees for Best Paper in Language 2023
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is proud and happy to announce that Evan Kidd, Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez and Rachel Nordlinger have been awarded Best Paper in Language 2023 by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).

The LSA Awards Committee has announced the recipients of various awards in different categories on its website. In the best paper in Language category, the work of Evan Kidd and his colleagues emerged as award winners. The title of their paper is ‘Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order'.

Evan Kidd says: ‘We are particularly proud of this paper. It’s the first psycholinguistic study of its type conducted with speakers of an Australian Indigenous language. The results showed that speaking a language where you can order sentence elements very freely significantly influences speech planning: compared to speakers of other languages that have a more limited set of word order options, Murrinhpatha speakers rapidly interpret an event before deciding on which word order they will use. The results show the value of studying diverse languages to challenge and refine our theories.’

All awardees will be presented with their awards at the 2023 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Link to the awarded paper

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