(last updated: June 24, 2025)
THE 50th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
NOVEMBER 6th – 9th, 2025
Keynote Speaker – Jean Berko Gleason (Boston University – Psychological and Brain Sciences)
Student Workshop Speakers – Jessica Cantlon and Steven Piantadosi (Science Homecoming – Founders)
Society for Language Development Annual Symposium – Large Language Models: What can they tell us about language structure and acquisition
BUCLD is turning 50 years old! We hope you will join us in November to celebrate this incredible milestone.
We are pleased to announce that the student-run annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) will be held on November 6-9, 2025.
Submissions are now closed. Notification of decisions will be released mid-July
We have also planned some exciting events to commemorate this anniversary
- A video tribute that recounts the past 50 years of BUCLD, with opportunities to record your own video at the conference.
- A curated exhibit that displays written memories, pictures, videos, and artifacts.
- A celebratory banquet for interested attendees.
- Special invited symposia that reflect on our progress as a field and chart a course for the next 50 years of research.
- Commemorative swag, merchandise, and so much more!
The BUCLD 50 organizing committee would love your thoughts and contributions: If you are interested in helping our team or have ideas to share with us, please reach out to us by sending an email to langconf@bu.edu.
BUCLD 50 is taking place in person, with options for remote participation, as follows:
- All invited presentations (keynote, plenary, workshop and symposium) will be presented in person and live-streamed for remote participants. Questions will be taken from both the live and remote audience.
- The majority of presentations and posters will be in-person.
- We aim to record all presentations and post them to a password-protected website for conference participants to access for 30 days following the conference.
- Authors accepted for a poster presentation will be required to pre-record and submit a five minute video of their presentation. All poster presenters will also prepare a printed poster.
- A limited number of submissions may be accepted for remote presentation.
Conference Information
The Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) is one of the largest student-run linguistics conferences in the world. BUCLD is an internationally recognized meeting of researchers in language acquisition and development, including first and second language acquisition, language disorders, bilingualism, and literacy development. BUCLD promotes the progress of science by providing a major venue for the dissemination of scholarly findings, the initiation and development of collaborations, and for professional networking.
The conference typically consists of over 150 presentations selected through peer review, as well as invited keynote and plenary speakers, symposia on topics of current interest, a research funding workshop, a professional development workshop for students and postdoctoral scholars, and a publisher exhibit. Over 500 researchers from around the world, from undergraduates up through senior faculty, attend BUCLD each year. ASL-English interpreting is provided for all talks and poster sessions as part of the mission to make BUCLD fully accessible. Conference proceedings are published soon after the conference. Since 1976, the faculty and students of Boston University have organized and run the conference with the help of our faculty advisors: Anthony Yacovone, Paul Hagstrom, and Amy Lieberman. For our current student committee, please visit our Organizing Committee page.
Volunteering
Are you local? Would you like to get involved with helping out during the conference? Contact us at langconf@bu.edu.
BUCLD follows the REIL guidelines from the LSA Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics.
