Neuroliterary time travel: It’s in the interdisciplinary details (Invited symposium talk)

• Emma-Louise Silva (Universite de Namur)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 For literary authors who revisit their experiences of youth to write autobiographical books, imaginatively drawing on memories plays a prominent role in the creative process. On the basis of cognitive literary studies and the archival study of creative writing processes, I have examined notes, mindmaps, manuscripts, and typescripts to chart how authors reconstruct their memories. The authors in the corpus, David Almond, Roald Dahl, and Jacqueline Woodson, writing in their fifties and sixties about childhood and teenhood, demonstrated a striking skill for remembering details across the lifespan. This raises questions as to their heightened capabilities for detail recall of what-where-when conjunctions. Studies have argued that whereas semantic memory (our collections of general knowledge and facts disconnected from the spatiotemporal context of learning) shows relatively little decline during the ageing process, episodic memory (our recollections of specific episodes linked to their spatiotemporal contexts) is affected by age-related deficiencies. Yet recollections of the spatiotemporal contexts of past experiences are essential for imaginative autobiographical storytelling, especially in the case of older authors writing about their youth. By drawing on these authors’ manifestations of literary craftmanship, this presentation aims to delve into detail recall across the lifespan by means of a neuroliterary lens, all while time travelling through the ontogeny of my own interdisciplinary trajectory.

The development of memory across childhood (Invited symposium talk)

• Markus Werkle-Bergner (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 The development of memory across childhood is a central theme in developmental cognitive neuroscience, linking maturational changes in neural architecture to the emergence of increasingly flexible cognitive abilities. A core challenge of adaptive memory formation lies in balancing two competing demands: extracting regularities across experiences to enable generalization and inference, while preserving distinct representations to maintain memory specificity. In childhood, this tension is particularly pronounced due to the asynchronous development of generalization and specificity. Yet, it remains poorly understood how children achieve a consolidation of both forms of memory. Computational models suggest that individual experiences are first encoded as hippocampus-dependent episodic traces, which only gradually become integrated into more generalized representations through consolidation processes—often facilitated by post-learning sleep. In this talk, I will present new insights into the neural and cognitive foundations of memory development. Drawing on examples from ongoing work in our group, I will highlight current research trends that integrate computational accounts with behavioral, electrophysiological, and structural imaging data. Together, these studies aim to advance a mechanistic framework for understanding how adaptive memory functions emerge and transform across childhood.

Feeling at home: The importance of (life) stories (Invited symposium talk)

• Winny Ang (University of Antwerp)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 How can stories support our wellbeing and mental health? As Ali Smith writes: *“Books mean all possibilities, they mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full.”* Stories help us navigate our social and emotional worlds by transforming the continuum of lived events into a narrative—sometimes coherent, sometimes fragmented or even contradictory—reflecting life’s peaks and valleys. Making meaning of the world is a fundamental part of being human. It allows us to explore different spaces of belonging. In this presentation, I will reflect on my work on identity, trauma, resilience, and imagination, focusing on the fascinating intersections between literature and mental health.

Is it only language that changes or do language users also change? … and so what if they do? (Invited symposium talk)

• Peter Petré (University of Antwerp)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 While attention to the linguistic study of lifespan change has been growing over the past two decades, we are still only just starting to understand how grammar fits in. For a long time, the dominant view has been that grammatical change primarily happens between generations. Lifespan change was considered to be limited to age grading, the shift between different styles or language habits among a repertoire in line with the stage of life one was in, such as adolescence, professional life, or retirement. Most of these findings are based on apparent time studies (which compare different age cohorts in a synchronic snapshot), or panel studies (which compare comparable cohort data collected at different points in time). True lifespan data are still quite rare. One reason is that ego-documents such as private letters or diaries, which are typically used for this type of research, do not contain enough data to do meaningful lifespan research on less frequent aspects of grammar. In this talk I will show what can be gleaned from large data sets from prolific authors with regard to the nature and frequency of lifespan change. Three case studies will provide evidence that lifespan change in grammar entails more than age grading. Data of the use of *be going to* as an emerging future auxiliary shows continued adaptation by individuals to ongoing change, including the adoption of structural innovations in the grammar, although still constrained by existing habits. Data on the complementation patterns of the verbs *remember*, *forget* and *expect* shows that authors ‘get better’ at their grammars across the lifespan, and that these developments arguably also have an impact on the language conventions in the community. Data on the use of the progressive show that members of the specific community of practice of ‘fire and brimstone preachers’, also seem to ‘get better’ at preaching, and that this will have an impact on their understanding of grammar. In general, significant lifespan change appears to be relatively common, even if not the rule, and its role in language change in the long term should be taken more seriously.

Ambitionz az a ridah: 2Pac’s changing African-American English accent and rap flow (Invited symposium talk)

• Steven Gilbers (University of Groningen)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 Regional variation in African-American English (AAE; hip-hop’s primary language variety in the US) is especially salient to its speakers involved with hip-hop culture, as hip-hop assigns great importance to regional identity, and regional accents are a key means of expressing regional identity. For rappers, using a regionally marked rap style (i.e., “flow”: the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of a rap performance) is another important tool to represent where they are from. Comparing East Coast and West Coast AAE prosody, West Coast AAE is marked by greater melodic variation and greater rhythmic variation. Similarly, West Coast rap flows exhibit more melodic and rhythmic variation than East Coast flows. This suggests a strong link between language and music in the AAE/hip-hop context, showing that rappers follow similar patterns in the domains of language and music when expressing their regional affiliations. So what would happen to the speech and rap of a prominent rapper if they moved to another region, switching regional allegiances? To answer this question, this study diachronically tracks the speech and rap of the late rapper 2Pac throughout his career. 2Pac was originally from the East Coast, but later moved to California, where he would become West Coast hip-hop’s leader in a conflict with his native East Coast scene. The results show 2Pac’s speech and rap became more West Coast-like over time, with the rate of this development towards West Coast norms increasing once he turned his back on the East Coast. He also regularly ‘overshot’ the target during this time, sounding more West Coast-like than his Californian peers. These observations suggest 2Pac consciously manipulated his speech and rapping to sound like a Californian when his changed regional identity demanded it, indicating that second (linguistic/musical) dialect acquisition involves both passive and active processes.

Mêmebruxelles: Language, memory and identity (Invited symposium talk)

• Patrick McGuinness (Oxford University)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 Having had the good fortune to be brought up in two languages - English and French - I spent a great deal of my childhood thinking it was not good fortune at all: arriving in England aged 9 with a French accent but an Irish name, and being asked where I was 'from', caused me huge anxiety and dépaysement, much of it quite raw. I spoke to my mother in French, my father in English, and so going to English boarding school seemed like an imposed choice (not mine - children don't choose much, which is why parents make such a show of letting them choose things like sweets or toys or cakes - the agency they do not have), and someone else's life I'd been fitted with. Much like my grandmother from Bouillon made me my school suits - clothes I fitted but which were not mine - I felt I was being given a life that belonged to someone else. In Bouillon, my mother's town, I felt both at home and always on the cusp of losing it all. It gave me a relationship to my languages that for a long time was quite painful, but which later in life became the seam from which I started to write: poetry first, because poetry is a language, as Valéry says, within a language (to which I'd add a language *between* a language), then fiction, then memoir. In my memoir-writing, I speak often frankly about these questions, and how they shaped me for good or ill. I now live in Wales, where I speak a third language, Welsh, the language of my partner and our children. My identity as a writer was in fact liberated by moving between Welsh and English as I once moved between French and English. So I think of myself as a Welsh writer from Belgium writing in English. In this talk I'll try to untangle this.

Conference opening (BAAHE conference sessions)

• Emma-Louise Silva (Universite de Namur)
• Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)
• Lieven Buysse (KU Leuven and ESSE)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11

A lifelong love for children’s books: Crosstextuality in the works of Angela Carter (Plenary conference talk)

• Vanessa Joosen (University of Antwerp)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 Angela Carter is one of Britain’s best known and most studied authors of the twentieth century. Whenever her work is associated with children’s literature, her collection *The Bloody Chamber* is mentioned – a set of daring rewritings of fairy tales aimed at adult readers. Few scholars mention that Carter also authored several children’s books herself. In this lecture, Vanessa Joosen approaches Carter’s work through the lens of “crosstextuality,” a term coined by Sara Pankenier Weld to describe intertextual links that connect children’s literature and adult works across oeuvres of authors who write for both audiences. While Carter kept a life-long interest in the books that she had loved as a child, she approached childhood quite differently when addressing young readers themselves, especially when late in life, she had a son of her own.

Models of the beginning and the end (of language): Symmetries and asymmetries (Plenary conference talk)

• Michael Erard (Radboud University)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11 In *Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words* (2025), I addressed the following asymmetry in the language sciences: while they are richly endowed with models of language’s beginnings, they have not paid sufficient attention to how language ends for individuals, which means that language across the lifespan has never truly been explored. In this talk, I inquire into the sources of this asymmetry from different angles and present the concept of the “interaction window,” the abstract social space in which humans interact with each other, as a conceptual tool for balancing out scientific attention. In the words of ancient Greek physician Alkmeon of Croton, “human beings perish because they are not able to join their beginning to their end.” Alkmeon meant that the human lifespan is not a cycle, but it also points to the value of creating models of both the beginnings and the ends of phenomena like language that involve the individual and the species, the self and the body, and organic abilities and cultural expectation.

BAAHE 2025 Annual General Meeting (BAAHE conference sessions)

• Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11

BAAHE 2025 Thesis Award ceremony (BAAHE conference sessions)

• Caroline Gentens (KU Leuven)
• Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)

Room: Pedro Arrupe / 103 - PA11