Workshop on Human Sentence Processing March 2020: Amherst, MA

人类每天都在使用语言，产生和解释新的话语没有太多明显的困难。心理语言学的跨学科领域旨在揭示和理解认知机制，这些机制是语言理解和产生的基本，复杂，但似乎毫不费力的过程。随着语言技术现在比以往任何时候都更加成为我们日常生活的中心部分，在计算机软件中复制这种简单，流畅的语言处理的难度是显而易见的。因此，了解人类的思维和大脑如何在日常生活中成功地运用语言的需求仍然像以往一样紧迫。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。该提案突出了这一富有成效的跨学科联系，并展示了最近的突破，已经源于它。资金将支持一个特别会议研讨会将与第33届纽约市立大学人类句子处理会议（2020年3月19日至21日），在阿默斯特的马萨诸塞州大学主办。本次特别会议将突出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创造了新的，持久的见解。通过强调这种方法带来的最新见解，以及为这种跨学科工作提供蓝图，特别会议还将为正在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，它将与第33届纽约市立大学人类句子处理年会一起举行。几十年来，纽约市立大学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（错误，博士后，研究生和本科生）。这是一个为期三天的会议，通常会收到超过300份摘要，从中选出大约35份口头报告和150份海报报告。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的论坛非常成功，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。特别会议旨在深化纽约市立大学会议的这一跨学科核心，突出语言学家和心理学家在研究人类语言理解和产生方面的合作在这一领域取得的众多成功，从而使会议具有独特的性质。特别会议将展示这种方法最近在语言和语言外信息的韵律信号，语言处理策略的跨语言变化，支持语言意义计算的神经过程等领域取得的跨学科突破。研讨会的参与者将探索语言学理论在一系列不同领域--韵律、句法和语义--与心理语言学研究之间的深层联系，这些研究是日常语言使用的认知和神经机制的基础。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.