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。心理语言学是一个跨学科领域，旨在揭示和理解语言理解和产生的基本、复杂、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加成为我们日常生活的中心部分，在计算机软件中再现这种轻松、流畅的语言处理的难度是显而易见的。因此，了解人类的思想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迫切。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。该提案突出了这种高效的跨学科联系，并展示了由此产生的最新突破。这笔资金将支持一个特别会议研讨会，该研讨会将与在马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校举办的第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）同时举行。本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创造了新的、持久的见解。通过强调这种方法所带来的最新见解，以及为这种类型的跨学科工作提供蓝图，特别会议还将为在该领域发展自己的跨学科研究项目的年轻研究人员提供宝贵的培训机会。提议的特别会议题为“语言学理论在心理语言学中的作用”，并将与第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（博士生、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，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领域培养了一代心理语言学家。这次特别会议旨在通过强调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，深化纽约市立大学会议的跨学科核心，使其具有独特的特点。特别会议将展示该方法所带来的跨学科突破，涉及的领域包括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，以及支持语言意义计算的神经过程。研讨会参与者将探索语言理论在不同领域之间的深层联系——韵律、句法和语义——以及心理语言学研究对日常情况下语言使用的认知和神经机制的研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.