Conference: Language Acquisition and Language Processing: Finding New Connections

认知科学的核心目标是了解人类大脑如何获得语言并使用它与他人交流。理解人类语言能力的基础研究在教育（语言困难对学术和职业成功构成重大障碍）、社交媒体参与（新的交流形式正在迅速发展）和人工智能（机器学习和其他算法方法赋予计算机越来越复杂的人类语言交流）等领域也具有实用价值。传统上，对人类语言的基础研究采取了分而治之的方法，研究社区的一部分专注于儿童如何学习语言，另一部分专注于成人如何实时动态理解和产生语言。然而，令人兴奋的新研究弥合了这一人为的研究鸿沟。神经和眼动追踪方法显示，婴儿对语言的不完全理解是实时的，几乎和成年专家一样快。同样，在特定的条件下，成年人对语言的适应性很强，通过短暂的接触就能学会新的说话方式、新的单词，甚至新的句法。该提案强调了这一新的跨学科工作和由此产生的突破，资金将支持在费城宾夕法尼亚大学举办的第34届纽约市立大学人类句子处理年会（2021年3月4日至6日）上举行的题为“语言习得和语言处理：寻找新的联系”的特别会议。会议将包括六位杰出研究人员的演讲，他们将语言学习和处理联系起来，一个专门讨论这一主题的海报会议，以及为年轻学生研究人员提供的旅行奖励。通过将研究语言习得的研究人员带到成人语言处理的首要会议上，该会议将允许思想的交流，在人类语言中产生新的重要研究课题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

A central goal of cognitive science is to understand how the human brain acquires language and uses it to communicate with others. Basic research into understanding human language abilities also holds practical value in areas such as education (where difficulties with language pose a significant barrier for academic and professional success), engagement with social media (where new forms of communication are rapidly developing), and artificial intelligence (where machine learning and other algorithmic methods endow computers with increasingly sophisticated human-language communication). Traditionally, basic research on human language has taken a divide-and-conquer approach, with one part of the research community focused on how children learn languages and the other focused on how adults dynamically comprehend and produce language in real-time. However, exciting new research has bridged this otherwise artificial research divide. Neural and eye-tracking methods have revealed that infants deploy their incomplete understanding of language in real-time, almost as quickly as their adult expert counterparts. Likewise, adults have been found, under specific conditions, to be highly adaptive to language, learning new patterns of speech, new words, and even new syntax from brief exposure. This proposal highlights this new interdisciplinary work and resulting breakthroughs.The funding will support a special session entitled “Language Acquisition and Language Processing: Finding New Connections” to be held at the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (March 4-6, 2021), hosted at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The session will include presentations from six eminent researchers who bridge language learning and processing, a poster session dedicated to this theme, and travel awards for young student investigators. By bringing researchers studying language acquisition to the premier conference on adult language processing, the session will permit the cross-fertilization of ideas, spawning new important topics of study within human language.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.