Workshop on the Development of the Language Production System

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The National Science Foundation will support a workshop on the development of the language production system, to be held in October 2005 at the University of Arizona. Existing research on this system emphasizes children's phonological and lexical errors. There is still no detailed developmental model of the production system. Developmental psycholinguistics has not explored how a changing performance system interacts with the knowledge that the system operates on. Adult psycholinguistics has yielded richly diverse models of language production that can inform developmental study. These include computationally explicit variants. The models have healthy empirical underpinnings and have been usefully applied to populations other than normal adults (e.g., aphasics). Yet, they do not articulate developmental predictions. The 'developmentalization' of language production models will benefit both the adult models and acquisition research. Application of theoretical models to a previously unstudied population tests the models. New theoretical and empirical questions will be worked out. For example, how are the production system's various processes and information types built up? How does the system reflect language-particular details? Before a speaker has mastered a grammar and lexicon, does the production system reflect default choices? Other benefits will come from integrating hypotheses about an unfolding capacity to deploy linguistic representations with hypotheses from competence-based theories. Language acquisitionists need to understand the nature and extent of the multiple influences on children's utterances, including effects of the production system itself. Following the Dahlem Workshop Model, this workshop will emphasize discussion of the unknown over presentations on the state of the art. A workshop report and an associated tutorial CD are planned. The workshop's impact will be enhanced by these elements, as well as by activities aimed at sabbaticals, theses/dissertations, and conferences. The workshop will encourage students and feature women. Academic fields associated with child development tend to include more women than many other sciences. As the cognitive sciences have largely neglected the developing language production system, another impact of the proposed workshop will be to direct new interdisciplinary research to an unexplored area. A plausible projection of this research is into the more applied areas of second language acquisition and teaching.