Conference: GALANA 2016 - Input Variation and Language Acquisition

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Language is a unique property of human beings. Children are capable of acquiring one, two, or multiple languages, depending on the input that they receive; in the U.S. and around the world, many people continue to learn new languages throughout their lives. Linguists whose work on language acquisition is guided by generative linguistic theory examine how languages are represented in the human mind, how these mental representations are acquired by children, how the different languages of a bilingual or a second language learner influence each other, and how language acquisition proceeds in the presence of developmental disabilities. In addition to advancing our understanding of how the human mind works and how learning proceeds, research on language acquisition has practical implications for such fields as literacy development, foreign language instruction, and the identification and treatment of language disorders.The 7th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition--North America conference, to be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on September 8-10, 2016, brings together established researchers and junior scholars who work on language acquisition from the generative prospective. The conference will address core questions on how first and second language acquisition proceeds, and will feature a special session focusing on the role of input variation. The special session will examine how language acquisition is affected by differences in language input across individual children and families, as well as across dialects. Children who speak non-standard dialects are at risk for being misidentified as having a language disorder, and theoretically informed study of dialectal variation in the input has strong practical value in identifying language disorders. The conference will feature five invited talks by prominent researchers with expertise in first and second language acquisition of grammatical phenomena, and, in the case of the two special session speakers, language disorders and dialectal variation. The conference encourages broad participation: all five invited speakers are women, and the conference provides travel awards to graduate student and post-doctoral scholar presenters. Selected papers from the conference will be published in a proceedings volume.