News & events

Artur Stepanov participated in the ambitious research project Besedomat, led by the Franc Ramovš Institute at ZRC SAZU, with CKMJ, University Medical Centre Ljubljana and the Faculty of Education at the University of Ljubljana among the participating institutions. The project investigated knowledge and prevalence of Slovenian words across different groups of speakers and placed Slovenian among the six languages worldwide for which large-scale data of this kind are available. On 7 September, the project concluded with a final event presenting its main results. More about the project and the event at this link.

Kiril Chuprinko presented a poster at this year’s Architectures and Mechanisms in Language Processing (AMLaP 2026) conference entitled “Processing of Wh-Adjuncts in Filler-Gap Dependencies: ERP Study in Italian.” The work was co-authored with Artur Stepanov, as well as Francesco Vespignani and Marco Sala from the University of Padua and examined the real-time processing of wh-adjunct dependencies using event-related potentials (ERPs).

Arne Gölz attended the prestigious 7th Crete Summer School of Linguistics in Rethymnon, Crete, where he took part in a range of courses focusing on semantics and had the opportunity to interact with leading scholars in the field. During the summer school, Arne has also presented his work in a poster entitled "Counterfactuality by Manner Rationality".

Arne Gölz has successfully completed a two-week Erasmus+ traineeship at the University of Potsdam, where he worked with Prof. Dr. Malte Zimmermann on an original research project in the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals. During the mobility he also took part in fruitful academic discussions with members of the Potsdam Lnguistics department.

Today CCML hosted colleagues from the University of Ruse (Bulgaria), our partner university in the ACROSS Alliance: Dr Yuliana Popova, Dr Ana Popova and Dr Krasimir Koev who are visiting UNG within the Erasmus+ framework. The visit included a tour of our EEG laboratory and a fruitful exchange of ideas.

We thank our colleagues for the visit and look forward to continued cooperation between UNG and the University of Ruse.

Today we welcomed third-year students from the Nova Gorica School Centre, GZŠ. During the visit, we presented the work of CCML and our EEG laboratory and showed them how contemporary experimental research on language is carried out.

The students learned how we use behavioral and EEG/ERP methods to study language comprehension in real time, how an experiment is prepared, and what brain responses can tell us about the processing of linguistic structure and meaning. The visit also included short interactive activities showing how closely language, perception and thought are connected.

Many thanks to the students and their accompanying teachers for their visit, questions and curiosity!

CCML took part in the University of Nova Gorica Day, held this year at Lavričev trg in Ajdovščina. The event brought science and technology demonstrations into the town centre — and we brought language, the brain and a little bit of Bouba/Kiki challenge, among other things, with us. :)

At our stand, visitors could try out the online Stroop task, learn why some sounds seem to “fit” certain shapes better than others and why it's not quite clear what we mean when we say that the shirt is red... Visitors were able to see how simple perceptual effects open up larger questions about language, how it is used, processed and interpreted in real time. We also presented EEG/ERP methods used in our lab to study language processing in real time, with an EEG cap on display, safely off-duty but very photogenic!

Many thanks to everyone who stopped by, took our tests, guessed who was Bouba and who was Kiki, asked questions and helped us show that language research can be serious science and good fun at the same time!

Penka Stateva has delivered an invited series of lectures at the joint interdisciplinary seminar event titled "Bilingualism: From theoretical models to the art of translation". The event which took place between 13.-15.5.2026 was organized by the Graduate School "Academia Iuventutis" at the University of Plovdiv (Bulgaria).

Artem Novozhilov presented his talk "Eye of newt and toe of frog: Russian word order in between factors" at the Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL35) conference that took place at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Penka Stateva took part in the Bilingualism Matters Symposium 2026 (29.-30.4.2026) where she presented the results of a research study entitled "Heritage grammar and processing in a border-shift context: Evidence from two Slovenian communities in Italy" as well as a poster outlining the activities of the Slovenian branch of the Bilingualism Matters.

Our doctoral student Danil Khristov has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation today! The title of his work is "The processing of feature assignment in the Bulgarian noun phrase", supervised by Penka Stateva. The doctoral committee included asst. prof. Petra Mišmaš (UNG), asst. prof. Sandra Villata (University Enna Kore, Italy) and assoc. prof. Tsvetelina Harakchiyska (University of Ruse, Bulgaria). Congratulations to Danil!

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Artur Stepanov attended the meeting between the University of Nova Gorica and the Science and Research Centre Koper (ZRS Koper) on 21 April 2026, where concrete areas of future cooperation between the two institutions were discussed. The occasion also provided an opportunity for productive professional discussions with colleagues on linguistics, cognition and possibilities for future collaboration with CKMJ. More information is available at the link.

Happy to report not one but two two recent articles of a CKMJ-led project group reporting results of two sister studies on heritage sentence comprehension and production, that appeared in February in April in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, respectively. Both studies address morphosyntactic restructuring processes in Slovene heritage speakers in the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia communities. These are the first comprehensive psycholinguistic studies of these speaker communities and arguably among the first psycholinguistic studies in the border-shift heritage context!