Workshop on On-Line Methods in Children's Language Processing

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A substantial body of work examines on-line language processing in adults, yet very little is known about how children coordinate linguistic and non-linguistic information to arrive at sentence meaning. Understanding how children process language, in real time, is necessary for building comprehensive theories about language acquisition. The workshop on on-line methods in children's language processing funded by this NSF award will be the first scientific gathering specifically dedicated to a new field of research that explores such issues, experimental developmental psycholinguistics. This workshop provides a forum in which scholars from different areas of expertise (psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and cognitive neuroscience), particularly those interested in applying on-line methods to study children's language processing, will discuss how current and developing empirical approaches can inform our understanding of language processing mechanisms in children. The workshop will take place in New York City, March 21-22, 2006, and will feature invited speakers and speakers selected from abstracts solicited for review. A poster session will provide graduate students and junior researchers an informal setting in which to discuss ongoing research. A planned volume of papers based on the workshop's presentations will summarize the current state of this emerging field and is sure to become a valuable resource for students, researchers, educators and practitioners interested in language acquisition and language processing in children.Scholars active in the area of experimental developmental psycholinguistics have presented their findings at various conferences, and have had little chance to interact in one particular setting. This workshop provides such a setting for researchers from different disciplines, and from the United States as well as Europe, to interact and potentially generate unifying observations as well as spark new trends in empirical approaches. The format of the workshop will encourage participation from graduate students as well as junior and senior researchers, and the target audience will also include educators and speech language pathologists, two groups for whom research on children's language processing mechanisms has direct applications.