Grammars and Parsers: Toward a Unified Theory of Language Knowledge and Use. Special Session at the 25th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Procesing

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Funding will support a special session at the March 2012 meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, to be held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. For 25 years the CUNY Conference series has focused on central issues in psycholinguistics, embracing a full range of empirical methodologies and theoretical perspectives in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive neuroscience. Responding to a remarkable acceleration of recent research developments in all of these contributing disciplines, the special session will showcase current models of how language knowledge and language processing interrelate. This fundamental question underpins all empirical and theoretical studies of sentence processing. Is it possible to embed a grammar, as devised by linguists, as a working component of a processing mechanism for language comprehension or production? Or is it a mistake even to suppose that 'linguistic' grammars might articulate with processing in such a fashion? To achieve a comprehensive understanding of how the human brain is capable of this most distinctively human activity, a sure sense is needed of the interplay between language knowledge and use. The special session also marks a broadening of the traditional focus of research on syntactic processing to include the processing of semantics (sentence meanings) and prosody (the melody and rhythm of spoken sentences). Six invited speakers will address these topics and the special session will be rounded out with related presentations selected from submitted abstracts. Collectively, these presentations will both deepen and broaden the questions that will occupy the psycholinguistics community in coming years. The conference will welcome a new generation of young scientists into the international psycholinguistics community by supporting students' participation with reduced registration fees and travel support. Publication of a volume containing the contributions of the invited speakers and related submitted presentations will make the benefits of this special occasion available to a wider audience.