Florida Linguistics Yearly Meeting 2026 (FLYM2026)

The FSU Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics is delighted to invite submissions for the FLYM to be held Oct. 9-10, 2026. The theme for this year’s conference is "Native American and Indigenous Languages and Contact." We will be inviting submissions in any area of linguistics. In the spirit of the theme, we particularly welcome submissions focused on Native American and Indigenous languages and language contact (involving any language). The conference will include sessions for oral presentations and posters.

This year, we are also excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Rosa Vallejos Yopán, Ph.D., from the University of New Mexico.

Submission instructions:

Please submit your abstract via easyabs.

Abstracts should be anonymous and a maximum of 500 words, excluding references.

Abstract deadline: July 24, 2026

Final notification of acceptance: Sept. 1, 2026

Rosa Vallejos-Yopán is a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the documentation and analysis of Amazonian languages, with an emphasis on morphosyntax, language documentation, language contact and bilingualism. Since 1997, she has conducted in-situ fieldwork as well as several interconnected projects driven by a desire to find a balance between her academic work and her commitment to the communities with whom she works. She has published numerous articles on Kukama (Tupí-Guaraní), Secoya (Tukano) and Amazonian Spanish. Her most recent publications address topics such as the conceptualization of space, the conceptualization of color, the categorization of entities, and the emergence of grammar. She is the author of "A Grammar of Kukama-Kukamiria: A language from the Amazon" (Brill 2016), co-author of "Diccionario kukama-castellano" (Formabiap 2015), co-editor of "Nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages" (John Benjamins 2018), and co-editor of "Morfosintaxis: Una mirada desde las Americas" (forthcoming). Vallejos-Yopán also collaborates with language communities in orthography design, teacher training and the creation of school materials to support their own language maintenance efforts. She teaches courses and mentors students on projects dealing with linguistic structures and the role languages have in the lives of people as repositories for their identity, collective memory, and cultural history. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Program and the Endangered Language Fund.

Abstract

Color conceptualization and crosslinguistic influence among Secoya-Spanish bilinguals

Color is embedded in the material culture and traditional technologies of the Secoyas from the Amazon basin. Secoya (Tukanoan) remains the dominant language in their villages, though Secoya-Spanish bilingualism is emerging. The large typological distance between Secoya and Spanish extends to the grammar of color. In Spanish, basic color terms are highly conventionalized adjectives. While Secoya has simple color terms, it can also describe any portion of the chromatic spectrum using three comparative constructions. The attributive construction conveys that objects share a feature (e.g., the dress has a mold attribute ‘The dress is blue’); the similative construction indicates that the objects are alike (e.g., the dress is corn stalk-like ‘The dress is green’); and the equative construction expresses that the objects are identical (e.g., the dress is identical to scarlet macaw ‘The dress is red’). In other words, Secoya comparative constructions profile degrees of similarity between a given object and elements from the environment. The conceptual differences between Secoya and Spanish prompts the following question: what happens when bilinguals who speak languages ​​with such structurally divergent color-naming strategies must select names for specific color categories? To address this question, I collected responses to an implicit naming task from 30 participants in Secoya and 15 participants in Spanish. Eight color categories were shown in a 4-min stimulus video depicting different-colored fish eating one another. Participants produced descriptions in real time. The color expressions were coded for origin language, color category, morphosyntactic complexity, as well as the participants’ bilingual profile, age and gender. In the Spanish task, Secoya loanwords were not used to name color. In the Secoya task, 27% of participants used only Secoya expressions, but 73% employed a combination of Secoya expressions and Spanish loanwords. In Secoya, participants almost categorically used native terms for specific primary categories (black, red, white) but increasingly relied on Spanish loanwords for other primary categories (yellow, blue, green) and derived categories (pink, gray). Additionally, loanword usage increased for color categories with high labeling variability and high complexity in Secoya. While male participants selected significantly less Spanish terms, loanword usage is not linked to language proficiency or age. Loanword usage is linked to universal perception of focal points, the conventionalization and communicative usefulness of color expressions, and color conceptualizations based on comparison. Overall, these findings suggest that the interplay of cognitive constraints and color conceptualization shapes language use in the context of emerging bilingualism. 

• Antje Muntendam
• Anel Brandl
• Zafer Lababidi
• Lara Reglero
• Alexander Rice

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Event Program - Word Document

Friday, Oct. 9, 2026

Student Services Building, Rooms 203 and 201

4-4:30 p.m. 
Registration

4:30-6 p.m. 
Keynote: Color Conceptualization and cross-linguistic influence among Secoya-Spanish bilinguals 
Rosa Vallejos Yopán, University of New Mexico

Chair: TBD

6:30 p.m.
Reception in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center
Green-Lewis House, 535 W College Avenue

Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026

Student Services Building, Rooms 208, 214 and 218

8-8:30 a.m.
Registration and coffee

Psycholinguistics - Room 208

Chair: TBD

8:30-9 a.m.
Bilingual lexicon connections in heritage speakers and second language learners
Kristin Gibson and Gretchen Sunderman, Florida State University

9-9:30 a.m.
Code switching as a cue for upcoming information: A Spanish-English EEG study
Maria J. Estrada, Yichuan Shen, Denise Suarez, Samantha Perez, Susan Williams, Aleena Peter, Andrea Ortuno, Claire Kuntz and Edith Kaan
University of Florida

9:30-10 a.m.
Beyond matter? Online processing of borrowed and traditional plural morphology in South Bolivian Quechua
Gaby Vargas Melgarejo and Tania Leal, University of Arizona, and Antje Mutendam, Florida State University

10-10:30 a.m.
Evidentials in Láadan and Lojban: Uniqueness and Native-American Underpinnings
Carolina González, Florida State University

Morphosyntax - Room 218

Chair: TBD

8:30-9 a.m.
Imperatives as default non-indicatives
Irina Burukina, University of Florida

9-9:30 a.m.
'Be' or not 'be': 'Bote' in Bangla dialects as an overt equational copula
Raj Adhikary, University of Florida

9:30-10 a.m.
Binding conditions in Copala Triqui
Jonah Wolf, University of Florida

10-10:30 a.m.
Island (in)sensitivity in exceptives
Kevin Yu, University of Florida

10:30-11 a.m. Coffee Break

Second Language Acquisition - Room 208

Chair: TBD

11-11:30 a.m.
From beliefs to action: Explaining interaction-seeking behavior in second language learning
Afsaneh Farhang, Florida State University

11:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Crosslinguistic influence in initial state learners of an artificial language
Matthew Patience, Florida State University

12-12:30 p.m.
From first appearance to peak usage: Rethinking proficiency assignment in learner corpus lexicography
Yigit Savuran and Stefanie Wulff, University of Florida

Indigenous Languages/Language Contact - Room 218

Chair: TBD

11-11:30 a.m.
The usage and diachrony of the irrealis in Santiago Matatlán Zapotec
Kelly Grissom Dunn, University of Florida

11:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
The Kasihta legend: A Hitchiti Rosetta Stone
Ian Iglesias

12-12:30 p.m.
Investigating nasal assimilation in Naso (Chibchan)
Sergio José Salazar Rodó and Florencio Eufemio Gamarra Rodríguez, University of Florida

12:30-2 p.m. Lunch

2-3 p.m. Poster session (Room 214)

3-3:30 p.m. Coffee break

Computational Linguistics - Room 208

Chair: TBD

3:30-4 p.m.
Evaluating generative AI translation tools across text types: Human ratings, automatic metrics, and quality dimensions
Yixin Qian, Florida State University

4-4:30 p.m.
Glossing SJQ Chatino with conditional random fields vs. transformers
Evan Halperin, Gabriela Velazquez, Hilaria Cruz and Sarah Moeller, University of Florida

4:30-5 p.m.
Maintaining San Juan Quiahije Chatino wiktionary entries
Jarrod Cruz, Hilaria Cruz, Jennifer Laman and Sarah Moeller, University of Florida

5-5:30 p.m.
Development and validation of a computer-based phonetic analysis grid for the assessment of articulation in Algerian Arabic dialect (Darija)
Ali Kaddour, Alaa Albeladi and Rezigue Abdessatar, University of Tipaza, Algeria

Language Contact - Room 218

3:30-4 p.m.
Interrogative intonation in Cuzco Spanish: A study on Spanish monolinguals and Quechua-Spanish bilinguals
Joseph Del Rossi, Grayson Russell, Alexander Rice and Antje Mutendam, Florida State University

4-4:30 p.m.
Intonation across the Uruguay-Brazil border
Raquel Ferreira Duarte and Antje Mutendam, Florida State University

4:30-5 p.m.
Caddo language attrition as English-Language contact
Nathanael Thompson, University of Massachusetts

5-5:30 p.m.
Language contact induced changes in the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderlands
Razaul Karim Faquire

6 p.m. 
Reception in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center
Green-Lewis House, 535 W College Avenue

Posters

1. Analysis of language contact in Reservation dogs: A case study of Native American and Indigenous languages contact - Syeda Summaya Qamar
2. Beyond lexical borrowing: Arabic contact with French and English and its effects on terminology and syntactic patterns - Imad Ghannoum, Lebanese University
3. Bring linguistics back to cryptanalysis: Using attestation to break the advanced encryption standard - Madeline L. Boese, University of Florida
4. Culture and interaction-seeking behavior in second language learning: The mediating roles of regulatory mode and regulatory focus - Yixin Qian, Florida State University
5. Does more always mean better? Examining the relationship between data size and quality with morphological segmentation - Kailash Shankar and Zoey Liu, University of Florida
6. Generating community engagement toward creating a beneficial Nasco dictionary - Ivana Miranovic, Sergio Salazar Rodo and Florentino Gamarra, University of Florida
7. Modeling L1-L2 differences in binding resolution during sentence processing, Demi Zhang and Edith Kaan, University of Florida
8. Reckoning with what's "reasonable": A corpus-linguistic approach to understanding the criminal burden of proof - Nayantara Balagopal Chandrasekhar, Emory University
9. Time, temporality, and tense: A typological comparison of Bangla and Japanese - Razaul Karim Faquire

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