The Relation between Parsing and Production

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The National Science Foundation will support a workshop on The Relation between Parsing and Production, to be held at the University of Maryland, College Park, as a part of the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 25-27, 2004. The workshop will bring together leading researchers on language production and language understanding from psychological, computational and neuropsychological perspectives, with the goal of generating a new synthesis of the parallels and differences between production and comprehension. Until recently, research on speaking and understanding investigated largely different phenomena, using largely different methodologies; this led to the view that sentence comprehension and sentence production are largely independent cognitive systems. Recent advances in both fields now suggest a different picture: parallel experimental and computational investigations of speaking and understanding indicate that there is substantial overlap in the mechanisms used for both tasks. The specific questions addressed at the workshop will include the following: What do sentence comprehension and production have in common, beyond the fact that they use the same language? Do comprehension and production operate on the same time-scale? How can experimental findings of close parallels between speaking and understanding be reconciled with the finding of dissociations between speaking and understanding in language disorders? What methodologies will allow closer comparison of comprehension and production?The workshop will have broad impacts for both research and education. A proper understanding of the relation between language production and language comprehension is important for a number of different fields, including language learning and especially the study of language disorders, where language comprehension and language production have often been found to be differentially impacted. An improved understanding of the relation between comprehension and production also has implications for the development of computational models of interactive natural language agents. The workshop will foster interaction among researchers in different fields, and by supporting the participation of students, it will enhance the training of a new generation of researchers. Results of the workshop will be made available through publication in a special journal issue.