Francesca Di Garbo (PhD in General Linguistics, Stockholm University 2014) is an Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University and the Laboratoire Parole et Langage. She is a language typologist, investigating the distribution of linguistic diversity in space and time. Her research seeks to understand the synchronic distribution and evolutionary dynamics of morphosyntactic structures of the world’s languages in light of the interplay between general human cognitive abilities and processes of cultural evolution. Francesca specializes in morphosyntactic typology, nominal classification systems, number systems, Bantu languages, and the comparative study of contact-induced language change. At the Department of Language Sciences at Aix-Marseille University, she teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in morphosyntax, language typology, research methods, and epistemology of linguistic research. She is the Director of the Master Program in the Language Sciences.

Bernadette O’Rourke is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Hispanic Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. Her research sits within the broad area of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language and focuses on the political and social meanings of language and their influence on society. She is particularly interested in the dynamics of multilingual societies and language revitalization. She has examined these dynamics across a range of fieldwork sites and language contexts including Galician (northern Spain), Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Faroese. She was Chair of the EU COST Action IS1306 entitled New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges (2013 – 2017). Co-authored publications include New Speakers of Irish in the Global Context: New revival? (Routledge 2020) and the Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities (Palgrave 2019). She is Co-I on the Horizon Europe MultiLX project and leads the Work Package on Languaging in Europe. She also leads interdisciplinary collaborations which bring together language-based researchers, urban analysts, engineers and software developers to explore the geospatial dynamics of urban multilingualism and the integration of AI and geospatial technologies to support this.

Marina (she/her) is a Research and Innovation Associate on the AHRC-DFG funded project “Breathing behaviour and non-lexical vocalisations in talk-in-interaction” at the University of York. Marina is a multimodal and interactional linguist who combines the qualitative methods of Conversation Analysis, the Phonetics of Talk-in-Interaction and Gesture Studies and conducts empirical video studies to research different social practices in interaction, including collaborative productions and co-animation, laughter, self-deprecation, and gossip. Marina has been a lecturer in (Applied) Linguistics at York and Liverpool, a postdoctoral researcher and PhD supervisor at the Open University in the UK, and for over a decade also a teaching fellow in Applied Phonetics and Discourse Analysis for English Language Teaching at several HE institutions in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Chiara Cantiani is a psychologist and researcher at the Child Psychopathology Unit of the IRCCS E. Medea – Associazione La Nostra Famiglia (Italy). She obtained her PhD in Experimental Psychology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Neuroscience in 2011 at the University of Milano-Bicocca, under the supervision of Prof. Maria Teresa Guasti and Dr. Maria Luisa Lorusso. Her dissertation focused on ERP correlates of morphosyntactic processing in developmental dyslexia. Following research experiences at the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany) and Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA), she is currently the principal scientist at the “BABYLAB” of IRCCS E. Medea, leading a decade-long project investigating very early neurocognitive markers of language and learning disorders. The project aims to identify early neural markers that can predict language and learning difficulties, ultimately guiding the development of timely and effective interventions.