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
	Point of contact:	terry@tama.ac.jp
	Programme committee:	Terry Joyce, Lynne Cahill, Vito Pirrelli, Dorit Ravid
	Related materials:	Programme+Abstracts Information Venue map Pisa map

AWLL15 registration
All participants should register by completing the Google form below; onsite participants should then click on the appropriate fee option below.
Please note that the deadline for onsite participation is 22 October and that AWLL15 fees are in pounds sterling (GBP).
	Full fee:	£230
	Student fee:*	£160
	Conference dinner (day 2):	£48
	Online (audience):	no fee
	*To qualify for the student fee, please email evidence of your student status. There is no charge for student participants to attend the conference dinner.
Google form:		Link
Payment options:		£278 £230 £160

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

10:30 – 11:00	Break

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

12:00 – 13:00	Lunch

13:00 – 14:30 Oral session 3
13:00 – 13:30	Rana Yassin & Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad Characteristics of early spelling errors in Arabic: The impact of visual-orthographic features [abstract]
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	Deia Ganayim Writing units or decades first in two digit numbers dictation tasks: The case of Arabic—an inverted writing system [abstract]

14:30 – 15:00	Break

13:00 – 14:30 Oral session 3
15:00 – 15:30	Marta Guidotti The visual and typographic dimension of language: Analysis and clustering of languages, based on language design features [abstract]
15:30 – 16:00	Dimitrios Meletis “The worst writing system in history”: Public attitudes toward the learnability of writing systems [abstract]
16:00 – 16:30	Terry Joyce, Hisashi Masuda, & Chikako Fujita Japanese rubi: Layered representation of meaning [abstract]

16:30 – 17:00	Break

17:00 – 18:30 Symposium: Perspectives on text reading and comprehension
17:00 – 17:30	Stefano Rastelli Plain language: A psycholinguistic approach (no forest for the trees yet) [abstract]
17:30 – 18:00	CNR-ILC ItaliaNLP Lab Profiling linguistic complexity: From human perception to language model interpretability [abstract]
18:00 – 18:30	CNR-ILC Comphys Lab Reading development is about multimodal coordination and linguistic awareness: An integrative, not-so-simple view of reading [abstract]

18:30 – 19:00	Transit gap

19:00 – 22:00 Walking tour to reception venue

Day 2: Thursday, 30 October 2025

09:00 – 10:30 Oral session 5
09:00 – 09:30	Naama Evanhaim, Daphna Lavi-Mudrik & Amalia Bar-On Rethinking morphology-based reading in Hebrew: New findings using a finger-tracking paradigm [abstract]
09:30 – 10:00	Galit Ben-Zvi & Amalia Bar-On Unpacking the role of genre and word-level information in reading Hebrew [abstract]
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
	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]
	Noboru Yoshioka (How) do underdeveloped writing systems distort grammar? Witten Burushaski ‘words’ in transcription [abstract]

14:15 – 14:45	Break

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

16:15 – 16:45	Break

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

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
09:00 – 09:30	Anna Melnikova & John David Storment Emojis and ✍ing: What counts? [abstract]
09:30 – 10:00	David Osgarby Pictish symbols: Letting graphetics inform graphematic [abstract]
10:00 – 10:30	Avital Braun, Dorit Ravid & Elitzur Dattner Compounding patterns in Hebrew writing: A developmental study [abstract]

10:30 – 11:00	Break

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

12:00 – 13:00	Lunch

13:00 – 14:15 Poster session 2
	Niamh Kelly & Keisuke Honda The Japanese language learner in the digital age: Re-evaluating the need for handwriting kanji [abstract]
	Daniel Zagar & Teng Guo The internal structure of writing systems: A cognitive approach [abstract]
	Alice Mazzilli Interowriting [abstract]
	Niklas Reinken Visible grammatical structures in handwritten texts in German [abstract]
	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 9
14:45 – 15:15	Sonali Nag Marking the differences: What precursor skills to reading comprehension tell us [abstract]
15:15 – 15:45	Georgia Niolaki & Aris Terzopoulos Introduction to the Spelling Profile Assessment (SPA): A new spelling test for English primary school children [abstract]
15:45 – 16:15	Wieke Harmsen, Roeland van Hout, Catia Cucchiarini, & Helmer Strik Towards automated literacy diagnostics: Insights from reading and spelling error analysis [abstract]

16:15 – 16:45	Break

16:45 – 17:45 Oral session 10
16:45 – 17:15	Rosso Manuel Senesi A dynamical framework for graphematic feature emergence: Evidence from error patterns in children's handwriting [abstract]
17:15 – 17:45	Djomeni Gabriel Delmon Tones as meaning making features in the orthography of Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon: The Case of Fe’efe’e [abstract]

17:45 – 18:00	Break

18:00 – 18:45 Panel discussion

18:45-19:00 Closing remarks [plus group photograph]