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

说话者内部和之间的语言变异：2016 年纽约市立大学人类句子处理会议特别会议

• 批准号: 1528486
• 负责人: Edith Kaan
• 金额: $ 3.3万
• 依托单位: University of Florida
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1528486&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Language; Variation; Within; Across; Speakers

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.

语言变异是一个非常突出的社会现象。世界人口日益增长的社会和地理流动性导致美国双语者和非母语者的数量不断增加，随后，社区和媒体中不同语言，口音和登记的存在和公众意识不断增加。尽管取得了这些进展，但关于人类如何学习、说话和理解语言的研究主要关注的是标准语言变体的单语使用者。双语者、传统语言使用者（特别是移民的孩子）和第二语言学习者的语言处理模型主要被定义为不同于单语母语的“不变”情况。然而，这忽略了一个事实，即认为自己是单语者的人也需要每天处理语言变化，而且世界上大多数人口都是双语者。鉴于语言变异的重要性和普遍性，这一现象在语言处理研究中不能再被忽视。语言变异是对语言习得和处理模型的一个挑战。听众如何认识到不同的话语是说同一件事的不同方式，而不是不同的事情？发言者/听众如何确定哪个选项更合适或更相关，考虑到上下文和他们正在与谁交谈？2016年纽约市立大学会议特别会议的目的是通过概述语言变异的最新研究，特别是双语者的语言变异，提高对语言变异的认识，以及更具体地对语言学习和处理研究的重要性。受邀演讲者将被要求解决语言习得和处理的语言变化的挑战，并提供如何考虑语言变化的答案。最终的目标是创造一个更现实和更有代表性的画面，人类的头脑如何表示，处理和获得语言。这将有助于提供与改善语言教育相关的关键实证研究结果，诊断和治疗语言障碍的技术，并将研究和处理模型扩展到语言科学中代表性不足的群体。