Theories of Sentence Processing and the Neuroscience of Language: Special Session at the 2013 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

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The cognitively based theories that influence current psycholinguistic research are based largely on non-neural data and theoretical constructs. The foundations of these theories are formal linguistic models of grammar as well as cognitive models of memory, attention, and learning. However, given that language processing must take place in a physical structure, it is critical to develop theories that are biologically plausible and compatible with other theories in the cognitive neurosciences. The 26th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, to be held in March 2013 at the University of South Carolina, will include a Special Session to address this question: Can the basic architecture of language developed in the 1950s and 1960s that was based primarily on linguistic evidence, or in the 1980s and 1990s based on statistical constraint-based models, survive in the era of brain imaging, brain stimulation, and sophisticated cognitive neuropsychology? If not, what new architectures for the language system are compatible with what has been learned from the entire range of relevant evidence--including linguistic, behavioral, and biological data? The Special Session will bring together six prominent researchers to consider this fundamental issue. This particular group was chosen because a range of major cognitive neuroscience methodologies besides traditional neuropsychology is represented, and because the speakers take diverse theoretical perspectives on linguistic architectures and processing. The Special Session will make contact with the widest possible spectrum of conference attendees, but particularly with younger scientists with interests in neurobiological approaches to cognition and language. The Special Session will also help to ensure that the resource-intensive research undertaken by neuroscientists studying language will have as broad an impact as possible and will begin to seriously inform fundamental theorizing in all areas of psycholinguistics.