Language Variation Within and Across Speakers: Special Session at the 2016 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

语言变异是社会中一个非常突出的现象。世界人口日益增长的社会和地理流动性导致了美国双语和非母语人士的增加，随后，社区和媒体中不同语言、口音和注册的出现和公众意识的增加。尽管有了这些发展，关于人类如何学习、说和理解语言的研究主要关注的是一种标准语言的单语使用者。双语者、传统使用者（特别是移民子女）和第二语言学习者的语言处理模式主要被定义为不同于单语母语者的“不变”情况。然而，这忽略了一个事实，即那些认为自己只会说一种语言的人每天也需要处理语言的变化，而世界上大多数人都是双语者。鉴于语言变异的重要性和普遍性，这一现象在语言处理研究中不能再被忽视。语言变异是对语言习得和语言加工模型的挑战。听者如何意识到不同的话语是表达同一事物的不同方式，而不是不同的事物？说话者/听者如何根据上下文和谈话对象来决定哪个选项更合适或更相关？2016年纽约市立大学会议特别会议的目的是通过概述语言变异的最新研究，特别是双语研究，提高人们对语言变异的普遍认识，以及它对语言学习和加工研究的重要性。受邀的演讲者将被要求解决语言变异对语言习得和加工的挑战，并就如何考虑语言变异提供答案。最终目标是创造一幅更真实、更有代表性的画面，展示人类大脑是如何表达、处理和获取语言的。这将有助于提供与改善语言教育、诊断和治疗语言障碍的技术相关的关键实证发现，并将研究和处理模型扩展到语言科学中代表性不足的群体。

Language variation is a very prominent phenomenon in society. The growing social and geographical mobility of the world's population had led to an increasing number of bilinguals and non-native speakers in the US, and subsequently, to an increased presence and public awareness of different languages, accents, and registers within communities and the media. In spite of these developments, research on how humans learn, speak, and understand language has been primarily concerned with monolingual speakers of a standard language variety. Language processing models of bilinguals, heritage speakers (in particular, children of immigrants), and second-language learners have been primarily defined as being different from the monolingual native, "invariant" case. This however ignores the fact that speakers who identify as monolingual also need to deal with language variation on a daily basis, and that a majority of the world's population is bilingual. Given the importance and ubiquity of language variation, this phenomenon can therefore no longer be ignored in language processing research. Language variation is a challenge for language acquisition and processing models. How do listeners realize that different utterances are different ways of saying the same thing, rather than different things? How do speakers/listeners determine which option is more appropriate or relevant given the context and whom they are talking to? The aim of the special session of the 2016 CUNY conference is to increase awareness regarding language variation in general, and its importance for research on language learning and processing more specifically, by giving an overview of the state-of-the-art research on language variation, particularly in bilinguals. Invited speakers will be asked to address the challenges of language variation for language acquisition and processing, and to provide answers as to how language variation can be taken into account. The ultimate goal is to create a more realistic and representative picture of how the human mind represents, processes and acquires language. This will help provide critical empirical findings relevant for improving language education, techniques to diagnose and treat language impairment, and expand research and processing models to underrepresented groups in the language sciences.