Conference: Socially Situated Language Processing: Special Sessions at the Human Sentence Processing 2024 Conference

关于人们如何产生和理解语言的研究通常集中在很少有社会背景的情况下，比如在高度控制的环境中阅读段落和回答问题。但是，人类在各种各样的社交场合中使用语言，而其他人在年龄、种族/民族、社会阶层等方面存在差异。这些因素影响着人类使用语言的方式。该奖项支持在2024年人类句子处理学会（SHSP）会议上举行的一次特别会议，该会议汇集了心理学家、语言学家、神经科学家和计算机科学家，以揭示人类大脑如何在丰富多样的社会环境中理解语言。SHSP是研究与语言使用有关的心理过程的首要科学组织，这次特别会议有助于吸引更多不同类型的学者来到这个领域——这些学者的参与对推进这一激动人心的科学至关重要。会议以主题演讲为基础，讨论以下问题：社会信息如何影响语言的理解、产生和习得？语言处理研究人员如何更直接地研究语言，因为它是由不同的社会群体实践的？这些活动和其他活动通过将认知机制（如预测处理和记忆检索）与来自更自然和多样化背景的新视角联系起来，扩大了句子处理研究的影响。会议促进了被调查的语言品种和语言社区的扩展，包括刚刚开始在语言处理研究中受到关注的少数语言品种。这些努力通过旅行补助和向少数民族服务机构提供外联服务，促进了对参加会议的年轻科学家的跨学科培训。特别会议还有助于扩大STEM渠道的多样性；以多元化社区为研究中心，促进了多元化学者的研究，吸引了更多多元化的学生，并为不同背景的学者之间的合作提供了机会。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。

Research on how people produce and understand language has usually focused on situations with little social context, such as reading paragraphs and answering questions in highly controlled settings. But humans use language in an immense variety of social situations with others who differ from each other in factors like age, race/ethnicity, social class and more. These factors affect how humans use language. This award supports a special session at the 2024 meeting of the Society for Human Sentence Processing (SHSP) that brings together psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and computer scientists to uncover how the human mind makes sense of language in socially rich and diverse situations. SHSP is a premiere scientific organization for the study of the mental processes involved in language use, and this special session helps to attract a more diverse set of scholars to the field—scholars whose participation is crucial for advancing this exciting science.The session is anchored by keynote presentations addressing questions such as: How does social information influence language understanding, production, and acquisition? How can language processing researchers engage more directly with language as it is practiced by and between socially diverse communities? These and other activities broaden the impact of sentence processing research by linking cognitive mechanisms, such as predictive processing and memory retrieval, with new perspectives from more natural and diverse contexts. The session promotes an expansion of the language varieties and language communities under investigation, including minoritized varieties that are only beginning to receive attention in language processing research. These efforts facilitate interdisciplinary training for junior scientists attending the conference through travel grants and outreach efforts to minority-serving institutions. The special session also contributes to broadening diversity in the STEM pipeline; centering research in diverse communities promotes the research of diverse scholars, attracts more diverse students, and offers opportunities for collaborations between scholars of different backgrounds.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.