Workshop on Human Sentence Processing March 2020: Amherst, MA

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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.