Workshop: Bilingual Morphology at the crossroads--New directions in the study of word structurMay -May 20-24, 2015, New Brunswick, NJ

在美国和世界各地，有很多人会说两种语言。说话者的两种语言中的单词是如何在他们的头脑中表达和处理的？他们对待两种语言中单词的部分是否相似？双语会带来什么特别的挑战吗？这个由美国国家科学基金会资助的研讨会汇集了来自多个学科的研究人员，讨论关于双语者如何学习、处理和表达单词内部结构的最新发现。两位国际知名的研究人员和10位精选的演讲者将为讨论双语者的思想告诉我们关于人类语言的心理表征奠定基础。参与者将评估这一新兴领域对一个双语水平不断提高的社会的更大的社会影响，特别是在准确诊断语言问题和教育课程设计方面。双语词法的研究提供了独特的见解，以了解大脑如何表征和处理复杂的单词，这些单词的表征如何相互作用，以及它们如何组合在一起形成句子。研究人员提出了词法（单词的内部结构）发挥作用的不同可能方式。双语者为这些不同的模型提供了肥沃的试验田，因为双语者处理的语言可能有非常不同的构词方式。此外，许多研究表明，形态学在解释为什么人们学习第二语言并不总是取得同样程度的成功方面起着重要作用。从应用的角度来看，形态学的研究对临床和教育工作者具有重要的意义。例如，许多用于评估儿童语言发展的临床工具依赖于他们分析单词内部结构的能力。同时，正常双语发展模式与非典型单语发展模式相似，导致对双语者语言发展困难的过度或不足诊断。因此，有必要为具有典型词汇形态习得的双语儿童建立一个基线，以便临床医生能够将他们与具有语言障碍症状的双语或单语儿童区分开来。这一点尤其重要，因为英语作为第二语言的学习者比其他孩子在学习上表现不佳的风险更高，因此准确诊断这一群体的语言障碍对他们的教育前景至关重要。

Large numbers of people in the US and around the world are bilingual. How are words in a speaker's two languages represented and processed in their minds? Do they treat parts of words similarly in the two languages? Does bilingualism pose any special challenges? This NSF funded workshop brings together researchers from multiple disciplines to discuss recent findings about how bilingual speakers learn, process and represent the internal structure of words. Presentations from two internationally recognized researchers and 10 selected presenters will set the scene for a discussion about what the minds of bilingual speakers tells us regarding the mental representation of human languages. Participants will assess the larger social repercussions of this emerging field for a society with increasing levels of bilingualism, specifically for accurately diagnosing speech problems, and for the design of educational curricula.The study of bilingual morphology presents unique insights into how the mind represents and processes complex words, how the representation of those words interact with one another, and how they are put together to form sentences. Researchers have proposed different possible ways in which morphology (the inner structure of words) works. Bilingual speakers provide a fertile testing ground for these different models, because bilingual speaker deal with languages with potentially very different ways of constructing words. Additionally, many studies suggest that morphology plays an important role in explaining why people learning a second language don't always have the same degree of success.From an applied perspective, the study of morphology has important implications for clinical and educational professionals. For example, many of the clinical tools developed to assess children's speech development rely on how well they are able to parse the internal structure of words. At the same time, normal bilingual development has shown similar patterns to atypical monolingual patterns, leading to inadequate over- or under-diagnosing of difficulties in language development among bilinguals. For this reason, it is essential to establish a baseline for bilingual children with typical acquisition of lexical morphology in order for clinicians to be able to distinguish them from bilingual or monolingual children with symptoms of language disorders. This is particularly important because learners of English as a second language are at higher risk than other children for educational under-performance, making the accurate diagnosis of language impairments in this group essential for their educational prospects.