International Conference on Head-final Structures, Rochester, NY, September 2007

该奖项将支持一个关于理解，说话和学习各种人类语言句法结构的国际会议。 它将于2007年9月21日和22日在罗切斯特理工学院举行。 近年来，人类句子处理领域取得了显著的进步，尽管主要是通过对英语的研究，英语是一种中心语首语言，因此其关键语法信息往往出现在短语首位置。 研究表明，仅基于英语等具有中心语首结构的语言的研究结果可能无法扩展到印地语，日语，韩语和德语等中心语尾语言以及具有某些中心语尾结构的语言，如汉语。 因此，比较中心语起始加工和中心语结尾加工对于研究人员更深入地了解人类大脑如何处理不同类型的语言中的不同类型的信息至关重要。 尽管在过去的15年里，人们越来越意识到中心语词尾结构的重要性，但研究人员对其进行广泛讨论的机会有限。 拟议的会议将促进国际学者之间的对话和交流，对具有中心语结构的语言进行前沿研究，并将提供一个展示新数据和分析，交流新方法，研究语言特定问题的场所，并确定未来几年该领域的研究议程。 预计会议还将增加我们对学习者如何习得包含中心语词尾结构的语言的理解。 选定的论文将编成一卷出版，预计将得到广泛传播。

The award will support an international conference on comprehending, speaking, and learning of syntactic structures in a wide variety of human languages. It will be held at the Rochester Institute of Technology on September 21 and 22, 2007. The field of human sentence processing has made remarkable strides in recent years, though largely through the investigation of English, a head-initial language whose critical grammatical information therefore tends to appear in phrase-initial position. Studies have shown that findings based solely on languages with head-initial structures like English may not extend to head-final languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Korean and German, and those with some head-final structures such as Chinese. Therefore, comparison of head-initial processing with head-final processing is critical for researchers to gain deeper insights into how human minds process different types of information in different types of languages. Despite the increased awareness of the importance of head-final structures over the last fifteen years, opportunities for researchers to extensively discuss them have been limited. The proposed conference will promote dialogue and interchange among international scholars performing cutting-edge research on languages with head-final structures, and will provide a venue for presenting new data and analyses, exchanging new methodologies, examining language-specific issues, and determining a research agenda for the field over the next several years. It is expected that the conference will also increase our understanding of how learners acquire languages that contain head-final structures. Selected papers will be published in a volume that is expected to enjoy wide dissemination.