RAILS Conference Series

Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS)

Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS) is a conference series initiated by the CRC 1102 Information Denisty and Linguistic Encoding. The goal is to bring together speech and language researchers whose scientific contributions reflect the full diversity of disciplines and methodologies – from speech to discourse, on-line processing to corpus-based investigation, through to language change and evolution – that have benefited from, and share, such rational explanations.

The first event took place at Saarland University in October 2019 and resulted in a Research Topic on Rational Approaches in Language Science jointly edited with colleagues from Edinburgh,Tübingen, Tufts and Newcastle (NZ) universities. With 79 authors, 30 articles and around 190k views and 40k downloads, the issue became one of the most successful research topics in Frontiers of Psychology.

We organised the  second edition in February 2025 focusing specifically on (bounded) rational communication, i.e. the idea that language users continuously strive to optimize their means of communication to effectively convey their intended messages.

Both RAILS conferences brought together researchers from various fields investigating how information dynamics, rational communication and memory interact with language use, variation, and change. After the successful completion of the CRC 1102 in the summer of 2026, we are looking forward to continuing this conference series within the Center for Language, Cognition and Computation.