Welcome to SNL 2023!

Welcome to Marseille and the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language! We are excited to have our meeting in such a beautiful city and vibrant hub of language and neuroscience research. Judging by our registration numbers, so are you! We have an unprecedented turnout of over 750 participants, a remarkable 50% increase from our average attendance. We hope this is indicative of growth within our field and a sign that SNL is seen as a home society by a diverge range of language neurobiologists.

We are deeply indebted to our local organizers Cheryl Frenck Mestre and Xavier Alario for bringing us to their stunning city and setting us up for success here. Our meeting organizers Shauney Wilson, Shawna Lampkin and their team deserve an especially significant recognition this year for managing the added demands resulting from the remarkable surge in attendance. Thank you for your exceptional efforts! Special thanks are also due to Stephen M. Wilson, our program committee chair, for skillfully managing the record number of abstract submissions!

Our scientific program features an exciting menu of talks and posters, including our symposium winners: NLP-based brain modelling organized by Shailee Jain, hemispheric asymmetry by Benjamin Morillon and language development by Ola Ozernov-Palchik and Ev Fedorenko. Katie Slocombe will give a keynote lecture on the evolution of language, Jean-Rémi King on the languages of brains and machines, and Asli Özyürek on multimodality as a design feature of human language.

We are thrilled to acknowledge the exceptional career of Nina Dronkers with this year’s Distinguished Career Award. Prof. Dronkers will deliver her Distinguished Career Lecture on Tuesday afternoon before our Welcome Reception.

This year’s Early Career Award will be presented to Maaike Vandermoste and the Dissertation Award to Shailee Jain. Our society journal, Neurobiology of Language, is introducing a Best Paper Award, which goes to Kelly C. Martin this year, with Eleanor Huizeling receiving an honorable mention. Please join us to congratulate our award winners and to hear their talks on Wednesday afternoon!

For our students and postdocs, a special social lunch is organized by Suhail Matar on Tuesday. During our lunch breaks on Wednesday and Thursday, you also have the opportunity for one-on-one meetings with a representative from the NSF, Betty Tuller, program director for the Perception, Action, and Cognition (PAC) program. 

Acknowledging global challenges, we will also host a Climate Change Discussion during Wednesday’s lunch, with Daniele Schon speaking on academia’s role in this critical time. To promote sustainable practices, we will also present a Carbon Prize to the conference attendee with the smallest carbon emissions, given their distance traveled to our meeting. Thanks to our local organizers Xavier Alario and Cheryl Frenck Mestre for this great idea!

This year, we are proud to partner with Black-in-Neuro and the Spark Society, two organizations with a mission to diversify the cognitive and neurosciences. We also launched a

web platform for member-initiated virtual activities outside our annual meeting. These initiatives aim to enhance the diversity and accessibility of our society’s offerings.

A heartfelt thanks to our diligent program committee, who invested countless hours in planning: Stephen M. Wilson as Chair, Yanchao Bi, Michele T. Diaz, Andrea E. Martin, Suhail Matar, William Matchin and Sophie Scott. To all who contributed their time and expertise in reviewing abstract submissions, we extend our deepest appreciation.

We would like to acknowledge our sponsors: National Institutes of Health (Major Sponsor),

Neurobiology of Language (The MIT Press) (Gold Sponsor); Brain & Language (Elsevier) (Awards Sponsor); Language, Cognition & Neuroscience (Routledge) (Awards Sponsor); Rogue Research Inc. (Silver Sponsor); Artinis (Bronze Sponsor).

Wishing you a wonderful time at the conference and don’t forget to tag us #SNL2023 and @SNLmtg on social media during the meeting!

Liina Pylkkanen,
Chair, Society for the Neurobiology of Language