Workshop on Human Sentence Processing March 2020: Amherst, MA

人类日复一日地使用语言，产生和解释新奇的话语并没有太多明显的困难。心理语言学的跨学科领域试图揭示和理解语言理解和产生的基本、复杂但看似毫不费力的过程背后的认知机制。随着语言技术比以往任何时候都更多地成为我们日常生活的核心部分，在计算机软件中再现这种简单、流畅的语言处理的难度显而易见。因此，理解人类的头脑和大脑如何在日常情况下成功地使用语言的必要性仍然一如既往地紧迫。心理语言学通过汇集语言学、心理学和计算机科学的见解来解决这个问题。这项提案突出了这种富有成效的跨学科联系，并展示了由此而产生的最新突破。这笔资金将支持在马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校主办的第33届城市大学人类句子处理年度会议(2020年3月19日至21日)的同时举办一次特别会议讲习班。这次特别会议将重点介绍语言使用的各个领域，从声音到意义的神经计算，这一领域的年轻研究人员对心理语言学的核心研究问题提出了新的、持久的见解。通过强调这种方法带来的最新见解，以及为这类跨学科工作提供蓝图，特别会议也将为正在这一领域发展自己的跨学科研究计划的年轻研究人员提供宝贵的培训机会。拟议的特别会议题为语言理论在心理语言学中的作用，将与第33届纽约大学人类句子处理年度会议一起举行。几十年来，CUNY会议一直是北美最著名的心理语言学会议，吸引了来自美国、加拿大、欧洲、东亚和拉丁美洲的约400名与会者(有缺陷的、博士后、研究生和本科生)。这是一个为期三天的会议，通常会收到300多份摘要，从中挑选出大约35份口头报告和150份海报演示文稿。对于特别会议的主题来说，重要的是，这次会议作为一个跨学科论坛非常成功，并在语言学和心理学的交叉点上培养了一代有价值的心理语言学家。特别会议旨在通过强调语言学家和心理学家在人类语言理解和产出研究方面的合作在这一领域取得的众多成功，深化纽约市立大学会议的这一跨学科核心，使其具有独特的特点。特别会议将展示这种方法在从语言和非语言信息的韵律信号发送到语言处理策略的跨语言变异，再到支持语言意义计算的神经过程等领域的最新跨学科突破。研讨会参与者将探索一系列不同领域的语言理论--韵律、句法和语义学--与心理语言学研究之间的深刻联系，这些研究涉及日常语言使用的认知和神经机制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Human beings use language on a day to day basis, producing and interpreting novel utterances without much apparent difficulty. The interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics seeks to uncover and understand the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the fundamental, complex, yet seemingly effortless processes of language comprehension and production. With language technology now more than ever forming a central part of our daily lives, the difficulty of reproducing this type of easy, fluid language processing in computer software is evident. The need to understand how human minds and brains successfully deploy language in everyday situations thus remains as pressing as ever. Psycholinguistics approach this question by bringing together insights from Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science. This proposal highlights this highly productive interdisciplinary link, and showcases recent breakthroughs that have stemmed from it. The funding will support a special session workshop to be held in concert with the 33rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence processing (March 19-21, 2020), hosted at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This special session will highlight various areas of language use, from sound right up to the neural computation of meaning, where young researchers in this area have created new, lasting insight into the core research questions of psycholinguistics. By highlighting recent insights this approach has brought, as well as providing a blueprint for this type of interdisciplinary work, the special session will also provide a valuable training opportunity for younger researchers who are developing their own interdisciplinary research programs in this area.The proposed special conference session is titled The Role of Linguistic Theory in Psycholinguistics, and it will be held together with the 33rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. For decades, the CUNY conference has been the most prominent psycholinguistics conference in North America, attracting approximately 400 attendees (faulty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students) from the USA, Canada, Europe, East Asia and Latin America. It is a three-day conference that typically receives well over 300 abstracts, from which roughly 35 oral and 150 poster presentations are selected. Importantly for the special session theme, this conference has been highly successful as an interdisciplinary forum, and has trained a generation's worth of psycholinguists at the intersection of linguistics and psychology. The special session is designed to deepen this interdisciplinary core of the CUNY conference that gave it its unique character, by highlighting the numerous successes in this field that have been achieved through the cooperation between linguists and psychologists in the study of human language comprehension and production. The special session will showcase recent interdisciplinary breakthroughs that have resulted from this approach, in areas ranging from prosodic signaling of linguistic and extralinguistic information, to cross-linguistic variation in language processing strategies, to the neural processes that support the computation of linguistic meaning. Workshop participants will explore the deep connections between linguistic theory in a range of different domains--prosody, syntax, and semantics--and psycholinguistic research into the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie language use in everyday situations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.