This parallel workshop serves as a counterpoint to the emphasized reflexive nature - why? - of the Why Linguistics Conference. The gist of the event is, namely, to present your personal research topic in a short, simple, concentrated from, while keeping it accessible to the interdisciplinary audience of the conference, thus enabling feedback from different angles and fields, both academic and industrial. As such, there are no restrictions on the topic, as long as it is related to research on (or applications of) human language. As with the main conference, we naturally welcome linguists, but also researchers from other fields like language psychology, communication studies, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, etc. We also very much encourage young researchers about to complete a degree to participate in the workshop (for example: why not get feedback on your soon to be defended master's thesis?).

Traditionally, Pecha Kucha (ペチャクチャ) is a short presentation format where the talk is accompanied by 20 slides, 20 seconds allocated for each slide. As such, talks are 6 minutes and 40 seconds in length. To save time, the slides are often set to change automatically after every 20 seconds mark. While we expect you to adhere to the time constraint (7 minutes tops for talks, followed by 3 minutes for short questions), it will be entirely up to you if you choose to follow the 20-20 format exactly and automatize the slideshow (the functionality exists in various presentation software), or to change your slides manually. Given the shorter and more concentrated nature of the presentations, the abstracts are expected to be similarly brief. An abstract for the Language Science Pecha Kucha should be formatted as follows:

Filename: PK_Firstname_Lastname_shortened_title.txt
[please submit your abstract as a plain text file]

Title of the Presentation
Name of the Author(s)
Affiliation(s) (university, company, etc.)

The abstract should consist of a single paragraph, no longer than 7 sentences. Summarize the topic of the research you are presenting, give a brief overview of the theory or previous research. Present your findings and their implications. You may also touch upon the questions posed in the call for papers of the Why Linguistics Conference, but this is completely optional. Please use the UTF-8 encoding.

References (if any; no more than 3)

The abstract submission deadline for the Pecha Kucha workshop is the 12th of April. Acceptance of the presentation will be communicated to the authors within a week from that at most. Please submit your abstract by sending it to the conference email address (whylinguistics [[at]] gmail.com). On the subject line, please write "Pecha Kucha Abstract" (without the quotes).