Conference: GALANA 2016 - Input Variation and Language Acquisition

语言是人类特有的属性。儿童能够掌握一种、两种或多种语言，这取决于他们接受的输入；在美国和世界各地，许多人终其一生都在继续学习新的语言。以生成语言学理论为指导的语言习得语言学家研究语言在人类思维中的表现方式，儿童如何习得这些心理表征，双语或第二语言学习者的不同语言如何相互影响，以及语言习得如何在存在发育障碍的情况下进行。除了促进我们对人类思维如何运作和学习如何进行的理解之外，语言习得的研究对诸如读写能力发展、外语教学以及语言障碍的识别和治疗等领域具有实际意义。第七届语言习得生成方法——北美会议将于2016年9月8日至10日在伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校举行，汇集了从生成视角研究语言习得的知名研究人员和初级学者。会议将讨论有关第一语言和第二语言习得如何进行的核心问题，并将特别讨论输入变化的作用。特别会议将研究语言习得如何受到儿童个体和家庭以及方言之间语言输入差异的影响。使用非标准方言的儿童有被误诊为语言障碍的风险，从理论上对输入中的方言变化进行研究对于识别语言障碍具有很强的实用价值。会议将邀请五名杰出的研究人员进行演讲，他们在第一语言和第二语言习得的语法现象方面具有专业知识，在两位特别会议发言人的情况下，语言障碍和方言变异。会议鼓励广泛参与：所有五位受邀演讲者都是女性，会议为研究生和博士后学者的演讲者提供旅行奖。会议的一些论文将发表在论文集中。

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.