Activities and publications

 

Please keep an eye on this page for more upcoming community events and scientific publications!

If you’d like to invite our team for a free visit or short talk at your community centre or organisation, please get in touch with us.

 

Public talks

August 2025: Our team gave a talk at Longsight Community Art Space, Manchester, for the Chai Kahni group for local men. We spoke about language and ageing and presented an overview of the MultiAge project.

 

October 2025: We gave a talk at Hamara Centre’s women’s group, Sheffield. Here we discussed the nature of multilingualism in the context of South Asian languages, how languages change across generations, as well as language and ageing more broadly.

 

May 2025: Dr Zlati Ilchovska presented a general-public talk on bilingual brains’ potential, as part of the multinational multi-city “Pint of Science” festival, York, UK. She talked about the value of bilingualism and the benefits it can offer to us, while also debunking a few popular myths about bilingualism!

 

 

Media

September 2025: Dr Farah Nazir and Dr Angela de Bruin were invited as guests at Fever FM Radio to discuss the way language changes with ageing and why there is little research on how this affects bilingual speakers, especially of minority languages like Pahari-Pothwari/Mirpuri and/or Panjabi. They also discussed topics such as which language we think and feel in and how that changes from a generation to another within a diaspora. Listen back here from 1:10:50 onwards using this direct link to the recording.

 

 

Conference presentations and posters

November 2025: Dr Angela de Bruin will be presenting a research talk at the Psychonomic Society meeting, in Denver (USA). She will be presenting research looking at the benefits of code switching, specifically how multilinguals might use code switches to let the listener know that unexpected information is coming up.

 

De Bruin, A., & Bennett, A. (2025, November). The influence of code switching on the processing of unpredictable information. 66th Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Denver, USA.

 

Late September 2025: Dr Zlati Ilchovska presented online a research talk at the Brazilian Seminar of Language and Cognition, organised by the State University of Campinas. She spoke on the topic of control during language switching. Additionally, she presented the structure of the MultiAge project, some preliminary findings of its first study, and talked about the role of the switching context, in which bilinguals practice their two languages daily. You can watch the recording of the Youtube stream, starting at 33:34.

 

Ilchovska, Z. G., Nazir, F., & de Bruin, A. (2025, September). Language control with ageing in heritage language speakers: Cued and voluntary language switching contexts. V Seminário Linguagem e Cognição - InCognitus, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem da Univ ersidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil.

 

Early September 2025: Dr Zlati Ilchovska presented a research poster with preliminary findings at the very large conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP), held at the University of Sheffield. The poster enjoyed a lot of attention and sparked the interest of a variety of researchers in bilingualism, multilingualism, ageing and minority languages!

 

Ilchovska, Z. G., Nazir, F., & de Bruin, A. (2025, September). Language control with ageing in heritage language speakers: Cued and voluntary language switching contexts. 24th biennial conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP), Sheffield City, UK

 

June 2025: Dr Angela de Bruin presented a research poster on a preliminary study looking at how multilingual language choice is influenced by the language choices of your conversation partner. This poster was presented at one of the largest conferences on multilingualism worldwide - the International Symposium on Bilingualism, in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.

 

de Bruin, A., Sequiera, A., & Grace, E. (2025, June). Language choice alignment in bilingual speakers. International Symposium on Bilingualism, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.

 

November 2024: Dr Angela de Bruin presented a talk on a research project looking at the way multilinguals’ language production is influenced by short exposure to other multilinguals. This talk was given at one of the largest conferences on experimental psychology worldwide (Psychonomic Society), in New York City (USA).

 

de Bruin, A., Wang, J., Daryanani, R., & Coumel, M. (2024, November). Bilingual language switching during production: the impact of exposure to another bilingual’s switching patterns. 65th Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New York City, USA.

 

 

Accepted publications

de Bruin, A., Wang, J., Daryanani, R., & Coumel, M. (2025). Language switching during production: The influence of preceding exposure to other bilinguals in different switching contexts. Memory & Cognition, 1-22.