AWLL15 homepage

15th AWLL international workshop on writing systems and literacy

	Theme:	Written words: From graphematic forms to meaning
	Dates:	29-31 October 2025
	Venue:	Italian National Research Council (CNR), Institute for Computational Linguistics “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa, Italy
	Invited speakers:	Elinor Saiegh-Haddad; Alessandro Lenci
	Local organizer:	Vito Pirrelli
	Programme committee:	Terry Joyce, Lynne Cahill, Vito Pirrelli, Dorit Ravid
	Related materials:	Programme+Abstracts [PDF] Programme [link to lower section with presentation abstracts, PDFs and presentation recordings]; Business meeting minutes AWLL15 Photos [link to lower section]

Programme [uploading in progress for presentation abstracts, PDFs, and recordings]
[currently with presentation abstracts; with PDFs and recordings to come in time]

Day 1: Wednesday, 29 October 2025
08:30 – 09:00	Check-in
09:00 - 09:30	Opening remarks

09:30 – 10:30 Oral session 1 [chair: Terry Joyce]
09:30 – 10:00	Lindsay Harris Does the complexity of Unified English Braille interfere with self-teaching? [abstract; PDF]
10:00 – 10:30	Keisuke Honda Graphematic representation in Japanese braille and print: Implications for grapholinguistics [abstract; PDF]

10:30 – 11:00	Break

11:00 – 12:00 Oral session 2 [chair: Sonali Nag]
11:00 – 11:30	Lynne Cahill How many ways can you spell that? Intra-document variation in Middle English documents [abstract; PDF]
11:30 – 12:00	Sara Budts, Yoshi Malaise, & Rik Vosters Standardization and orthographic variation in Late Modern Dutch witness depositions [abstract; PDF]

12:00 – 13:00	Lunch

13:00 – 14:30 Oral session 3 [chair: David Share]
13:00 – 13:30	Rana Yassin, David L. Share & Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad Characteristics of early spelling errors in Arabic: The impact of visual-orthographic features [abstract; PDF]
13:30 – 14:00	Nancy Joubran-Awadie & Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad How does morphological awareness before and after the onset of formal reading instruction affect later reading outcomes in a rich morphological language? [abstract]
14:00 – 14:30	Dimitrios Meletis “The worst writing system in history”: Public attitudes toward the learnability of writing systems [abstract; PDF]

14:30 – 15:00	Break

15:00 – 16:30 Oral session 4 [chair: Alessandro Lenci]
15:00 – 15:30	Marta Guidotti The visual and typographic dimension of language: Analysis and clustering of languages, based on language design features [abstract; PDF]
15:30 – 16:00	Terry Joyce, Hisashi Masuda, & Chikako Fujita Japanese rubi: Layered representation of meaning [abstract; PDF]

16:00 – 16:30	Break

16:30 – 18:00 Symposium: Perspectives on text reading and comprehension [chair: Vito Pirrelli]
	CNR-ILC ItaliaNLP Lab Profiling linguistic complexity: From human perception to language model interpretability [abstract]
	CNR-ILC Comphys Lab Reading development is about multimodal coordination and linguistic awareness: An integrative, not-so-simple view of reading [abstract]
18:00 – 22:00 Walking tour to reception venue

Day 2: Thursday, 30 October 2025

09:00 – 10:30 Oral session 5 [chair: Vito Pirrelli]
09:00 – 09:30	Naama Evanhaim & Amalia Bar-On Rethinking morphology-based reading in Hebrew: New findings using a finger-tracking paradigm [abstract; PDF]
09:30 – 10:00	Galit Ben-Zvi & Amalia Bar-On Unpacking the role of genre and word-level information in reading Hebrew [abstract; PDF]
10:00 – 10:30	David L. Share & Elinor Saiegh-Haddad Arabic and Hebrew: Fraternal but not identical twins [abstract]

10:30 – 11:00	Break

11:00 – 12:00 Keynote 1 [chair: Dorit Ravid]
	Elinor Saiegh-Haddad The triangulation of linguistic, orthographic, and diglossic factors in reading development in Arabic; [abstract]

12:00 – 13:00	Lunch

13:00 – 14:15 Poster session 1
	Aleksandra Twardokęs Visual languages of branding systems. The case of branding system of the Zooba restaurant; [abstract]
	Rawan Abdulmonem M Almuzaini What can biscriptality offer in the realm of social media? [abstract [PDF]
	Kathleen Carroll The relationship of writing beliefs to quality and understanding in STEM and non-STEM writing [abstract]

14:15 – 14:45	Break

14:45 – 16:15 Oral session 6 [chair: Lynne Cahill]
14:45 – 15:15	Svetlana Alexeeva & Alisa Lezina Processing letter position in transparent scripts: Insights from Korean hangul abstract; PDF]
15:15 – 15:45	Gordon Berthin Comparing the syllabary and logography models of the Rongorongo glyphic script of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) abstract; PDF]
15:45 – 16:15	Li (Mark) Bai Addressing complexity in learning to read the Manchu writing system [abstract; [PDF]

16:15 – 16:45	Break

16:45 – 17:45 Oral session 7 [chair: Dimitrios Meletis]
16:45 – 17:15	Jonas Romstadt Breaking written words [abstract; PDF]
17:15 – 17:45	Jordi Fortuny Ambiguity and the creation and evolution of writing systems [abstract; PDF]

17:45 – 18:00	Break

18:00 – 18:45 AWLL business meeting

18:45 – 20:00	Transit gap

20:00 – 22:00 Conference dinner

Day 3: Friday, 31 October 2025

09:00 – 10:30 Oral session 8 [chair: Amalia Bar-On]
09:00 – 09:30	Noboru Yoshioka (How) do underdeveloped writing systems distort grammar? Written Burushaski ‘words’ in transcription [abstract; PDF]
09:30 – 10:00	David Osgarby Pictish symbols: Letting graphetics inform graphematic [abstract; PDF]
10:00 – 10:30	Avital Braun, Dorit Ravid & Elitzur Dattner Compounding patterns in Hebrew writing: A developmental study [abstract; PDF]

10:30 – 11:00	Break

11:00 – 12:00 Keynote 1 [chair: Vito Pirrelli]
	Alessandro Lenci How forms shape meaning: What distributional learning can and can’t do in the era of LLMs [abstract; PDF]

12:00 – 13:00	Lunch

16:45 – 17:45 Oral session 9 [chair: Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad]
13:00 – 13:30	Alice Mazzilli Interowriting [abstract; PDF]
13:30 – 14:00	Niklas Reinken Visible grammatical structures in handwritten texts in German [abstract; PDF]
14:00 – 14:30	Rosso Manuel Senesi A dynamical framework for graphematic feature emergence: Evidence from error patterns in children's handwriting [abstract]

14:30 – 15:00	Break

15:00 – 16:00 Oral session 10 [chair: Elinor Saiegh-Haddad]
15:00 – 15:30	Sonali Nag Marking the differences: What precursor skills to reading comprehension tell us [abstract]
15:30 – 16:00	Georgia Niolaki & Aris Terzopoulos Introduction to the Spelling Profile Assessment (SPA): A new spelling test for English primary school children [abstract; PDF]

16:00 – 16:30	Break

16:30 – 17:30 Oral session 11 [chair: Keisuke Honda]
16:30 – 17:00	Wieke Harmsen, Roeland van Hout, Catia Cucchiarini, & Helmer Strik Towards automated literacy diagnostics: Insights from reading and spelling error analysis [abstract; [PDF;
17:00 – 17:30	Daniel Zagar & Teng Guo The internal structure of writing systems: A cognitive approach [abstract; PDF]

17:30 – 17:45	Break

17:45 – 18:30 Panel discussion

18:30-18:45 Closing remarks [plus group photograph]


AWLL15 Photos


Many AWLL15 onsite participants [taken on during break on final day]


Day 1 photos

Prior to opening remarks	Opening remarks \| Vito Pirelli (local organizer)

Oral session 1 \| Keisuke Honda	Oral session 2 \| Sara Budts, Yoshi Malaise, & Rik Vosters

Oral session 3 \| Rana Yassin et al	Oral session 3 \| Nancy Joubran-Awadie & Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad

Oral session 3 \| Dimitrios Meletis	Oral session 4 \| Terry Joyce et al

Symposium 1 \| CNR-ILC ItaliaNLP Lab	Symposium 1 \| CNR-ILC Comphys Lab

Sample of break refreshments


Day 2

Oral session 5 \| Naama Evanhaim & Amalia Bar-On	Oral session 5 \| Galit Ben-Zvi & Amalia Bar-On

Oral session 5 \| David L. Share & Elinor Saiegh-Haddad	Keynote 1 \| Elinor Saiegh-Haddad

Oral session 7 \| Jonas Romstadt	Oral session 7 \| Jordi Fortuny

Conference dinner 1	Conference dinner 2

Conference dinner 3	Conference dinner 4


Day 3

Oral session 8 \| Avital Braun et al	Keynote 2 \| Alessandro Lenci

Oral session 10 \| Sonali Nag	Oral session 10 \| Georgia Niolaki & Aris Terzopoulos

Oral session 11 \| Wieke Harmsen et al	Oral session 11 \| Daniel Zagar & Teng Guo

ClosingPanel	Some of the Israeli delegation