Language Variation Within and Across Speakers: Special Session at the 2016 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

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Language variation is a very prominent phenomenon in society. The growing social and geographical mobility of the world's population had led to an increasing number of bilinguals and non-native speakers in the US, and subsequently, to an increased presence and public awareness of different languages, accents, and registers within communities and the media. In spite of these developments, research on how humans learn, speak, and understand language has been primarily concerned with monolingual speakers of a standard language variety. Language processing models of bilinguals, heritage speakers (in particular, children of immigrants), and second-language learners have been primarily defined as being different from the monolingual native, "invariant" case. This however ignores the fact that speakers who identify as monolingual also need to deal with language variation on a daily basis, and that a majority of the world's population is bilingual. Given the importance and ubiquity of language variation, this phenomenon can therefore no longer be ignored in language processing research. Language variation is a challenge for language acquisition and processing models. How do listeners realize that different utterances are different ways of saying the same thing, rather than different things? How do speakers/listeners determine which option is more appropriate or relevant given the context and whom they are talking to? The aim of the special session of the 2016 CUNY conference is to increase awareness regarding language variation in general, and its importance for research on language learning and processing more specifically, by giving an overview of the state-of-the-art research on language variation, particularly in bilinguals. Invited speakers will be asked to address the challenges of language variation for language acquisition and processing, and to provide answers as to how language variation can be taken into account. The ultimate goal is to create a more realistic and representative picture of how the human mind represents, processes and acquires language. This will help provide critical empirical findings relevant for improving language education, techniques to diagnose and treat language impairment, and expand research and processing models to underrepresented groups in the language sciences.