The Balkans are a melting pot of grammars, where several features of different languages blend and resemble one another due to centuries-long extensive language contact. MindContact examines the cognitive aspects modulating how languages change due to areal contact with an interdisciplinary approach by connecting contact linguistics and psycholinguistics –two fields of linguistics that have barely interacted. Blending perspectives from psycholinguistics and contact linguistics, this project takes the concept of ‘areal contact’ phenomena in the Balkans under scrutiny, focusing on four understudied minority language varieties: Romani, Ladino, Istanbul Greek, and Rumelian Turkish. We will critically investigate on-going language change patterns including future/perfect forms, evidentiality, indefinite articles, adjective-noun order in those particular languages. MindContact aims to (1) advance knowledge regarding how areal convergence occurs and which cognitive factors contribute to it, (2) validate theories and lab-based protocols with experimental fieldwork data from minority languages, and (3) generate tools and resources for studying language change and loss under minority language conditions. The novel character of this proposal is the involvement of an ‘experimental fieldwork’ approach to language contact by using powerful psycholinguistic techniques such as eye-movement monitoring and electrophysiology. These time-sensitive tools provide a unique window into understanding the cognitive underpinnings of language contact outcomes. By synthesising several experimental data from its subprojects, MindContact seeks to arrive at a unified hypothesis of explaining how cognitive factors are involved in areal contact, setting the foundations of a new stream of research.

In South America, since the beginning of the 16th century, colonization introduced deep ruptures in the organization of pre-Hispanic societies of the Central Andean Area, corresponding to modern Peru. These changes have affected the daily life of these populations, disrupted by forced displacements, as well as their economic and cultural practices by the imposition of components of the European society such as the Christian cult. Andean Native populations have however perpetuated many ancient practices, through processes of resistance leading to a syncretism between pre-Hispanic and European traditions. This syncretism also occurred through the contacts between Andean Native populations and African and Afrodescendant slaves’ communities, who were forcefully brought to the Peruvian coasts from the beginning of the XVI century. The Colonial Period thus appears as a key period of the of the Andean Area. However, this period is most often written by historians from the analysis of archives produced by the colonial administration. The history of this period is therefore mainly a political and economic history from the Spanish perspective, providing limited insights on the daily life, the experiences and the negotiation processes of the Andean Native, African and Afro-descendant populations with the European norms. The MICA project aims to challenge the current state of research by generating groundbreaking hypotheses on the history of the ancient populations of the northern coast of Peru. This region is an outstanding case study to investigate the transition between the prehispanic and colonial periods, which witnessed the installation of several religious orders founding churches and villages where Spanish, Andean Native, African and Afrodescendant populations coexisted. In this region, colonial archaeology is an emerging discipline, which by means of a material and multiscalar approach addresses the relations between Europeans and Andean populations. These researches highlight the continuity of prehispanic practices, while testifying to processes of ethnogenesis. However, by focusing excavations on ritual contexts, very little scientific knowledge exists on the daily life of the Andean Native populations, and even less on the daily life of slaves, who remain the great forgotten of this research. By omitting the study of the relations between Andean Native and African communities, they also struggle to illustrate to what extent the interactions between Andean, African and Afrodescendants populations shaped the Peruvian national identity. The MICA project proposes to study for the first time three sites founded in the sixteenth century in the Jequetepeque Valley, to define the impact of the colonial regime on the domestic, social, economic, and cultural practices of the Andean Native, African and Afrodescendant populations during the first century of colonization. Through a material approach, based on the archaeological excavation of the Anlape and Omnep churches, the associated residential areas, as well as San Pedro de Lloco, the first town founded in the valley, the objective of this project is to contrast the historical knowledge of the period and to replace in the scientific discourse the perspective of Andean Native, African and Afrodescendant communities. This project is anchored on an international collaboration between European, Peruvian, and North American institutions, and stands outs by its highly multidisciplinary character, bringing together archaeological, historical, and sociocultural anthropological researchers. The project will found a replicable method for the study of colonial material remains, adapted to the challenges of the Andean context. The particularity of this research also lies in its implementation in an urban context, making it essential to couple its scientific interest to a social, cultural, and economic project with the authorities and local populations.

Old Pekingese and the Genesis of Standard Mandarin (1850-1950) Lin XIAO In the hundred years (1850-1950) that followed China’s entry into the modern world, the Chinese language underwent radical social and cultural changes that eventually resulted in the fixing of a standardized national language. This project proposes a cultural transfer approach to language contact between the various languages and dialects that were spoken in the city of Peking during the years 1850-1950, in the period that led to the genesis of Standard Mandarin. Between 1898 and 1949, Chinese grammars were written and published by Chinese scholars under the influence of Chinese grammars compiled by Western scholars. Some of these first grammars were based on existing grammars, including grammars of other languages. The study of the grammatical description of Old Pekingese will constitute the heart of this scientific project as a key milestone in understanding the process of koinéisation of Mandarin dialects and the gradual elaboration of a common language. This project, submitted as part of the ERC Starting Grant, aims to (a) first, identify the linguistic system specific to Old Pekingese as the basic dialect of Standard Mandarin; (b) second, examine the language contact phenomena that affected the Pekingese language under pressure from Altaic languages (especially Mongolic, Tungusic-Manchu and Turkic languages); (c) and, above all, present a sketch description of Old Pekingese as documented between 1850 and 1950, with particular emphasis on its morphosyntactic constructions (especially word order, noun phrases, pronominal system, verbal series, prepositions and conjunctions, interrogative sentences). The corpus of this research will be of a twofold nature: (i) grammars from the 18th and 20th centuries compiled by Western sinologists and missionaries, most of whom resided in China; (ii) native Chinese documents (grammars and textbooks) from the same period. Research-oriented digital humanities will allow me to master and unify this corpus in order to find the coherence of the historical changes documented in Old Pekingese and their relationship with the genesis of the Standard Mandarin: most of the texts that will be used in this project have been digitized and can be queried digitally. The study will permit a reappraisal of some aspects of the history of the Chinese language, and particularly the genesis of Standard Mandarin. It is commonly assumed that, around 1850, Peking Mandarin replaced Nanking Mandarin to become the main common language. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), the Manchu ruling group had adopted a policy whereby the eight banners that made up the Manchu and Mongol population resided in the inner city of Peking while the Han Chinese lived in the outer city. Towards the end of the dynasty, the two language systems (Chinese and Manchu) merged under pressure from the pervasive language contact between them, to form what is called Peking Mandarin, which was promoted to be the common language around 1850, and was announced to be the national language by the Qing in 1909 replacing Classical Chinese as a written language.

The ability to read is the foundation of human education and social progress. Yet we are far from having reached a full understanding of how expert reading skills are acquired. Despite adequate instruction, children and adults do not all reach expert reading skills, with implications for many activities in everyday life and consequences for academic success, professional and social integration. Understanding reading acquisition and its deficits represents thus a major societal issue. Concerning the cognitive factors underlying reading deficits, many non-verbal factors have been identified such as visual attention and executive functions like error monitoring. Error monitoring is crucial in a variety of situations as it allows individuals to detect and correct their own errors and avoid repeating them in the future. The present project aims to examine the impact of error monitoring abilities on the development of expert reading skills and reading disorders. First, by combining different techniques (behavioral, electrophysiological and electropmyographic data), the proposal offers a systematic examination of the presence and magnitude of error monitoring impairment in adults with different kinds of reading deficits (i.e., dyslexic readers, poor readers characterized by a low exposure to print and a low socio-economic level). Second, the project will determine in a longitudinal study if error monitoring abilities measured before reading instruction constitute a good predictor of future reading skills in children. Third, we will combine a theoretical and a practical approach, by evaluating the impact of an error monitoring training program on reading skills in dyslexic children. Taken together, the present findings will lead to a better characterization of developmental dyslexia relatively to other kinds of reading deficits. In the long term, the findings could improve the early identification of children at risk to develop reading difficulties as well as improve teaching methods for reading acquisition.

This project aims to improve our current understanding of Basque historical phonology by incorporating recent advances in theories of phonetically based sound change, contact linguistics and phonological typology and by using state-of-the-art quantitative and experimental techniques. The new approach is to combine the historical-comparative method with phonetic detail and quantitative typological data for studying the historical sound patterns of a language isolate such as Basque, in which the comparative method finds most difficulties. This project will result in a better understanding of sound patterns that have been subject of discussion for years in Basque historical phonology, and it will advance our knowledge of general typologies of sound change with a thorough analysis of the uncommon sound changes that will be studied. The areas of interest cover the evolution of the opposition between /h/ and /h~/ (only documented in two other languages), changes in the phonetic cues underlying the opposition between the two stop series (from [spread glottis] to voicing), changes in the place of articulation of sibilants, the evolution of vowel inventories, and changes in the accentual system (from phrasal pitch accent to word-level systems, based on pitch or stress depending on the dialect). For each topic under study, the employed methodology will combine philological work comparing the dialectal variants attested in older stages of the language and analysis of acoustic and articulatory data. In cases in which the precise phonetic realization of a given segment has not been described, varieties of interest will be found in the literature in order to obtain acoustic and physiological data encompassing all relevant phonological contexts in the field. Then, precise phonetic information will be extracted from field recordings. Differences regarding age-group will be explored whenever there is evidence for a sound change in progress. Experiments will be devised to find coarticulatory patterns that might have yielded sound change in the past, including analyzing reconstructed sequences that are not found in the modern language (e.g. #st-) as pronounced by speakers of modern Basque. The project methodology will also include other data-based approaches, such as computer-based segment co-occurrence searches of big corpora to find potential biases in the phonotactic distribution of the segments under study and searches for typological parallels of each process. The role of contact will be assessed by looking for convergent evolutions in neighboring languages. The long-term significance of the project lies in contributing to the reconstruction of the phonology of Proto-Basque as well as to both typologies of phonetically based sound change and sound change in situations of linguistic contact. An indirect and major benefit of the project is that it will provide a new methodology for the study of the historical phonologies of language isolates.