Workshop on Variation in the Mechanisms of Human Language Processing; March 29-31, 2019, Boulder, CO

纵观历史，理解和创造语言的能力对人类的成功至关重要，对现代生活的成功也至关重要。人类大脑如何实现这种能力的问题是认知科学的核心挑战之一。回答这个问题最常见的方法集中在记录正常发育的年轻人的语言处理能力，生成所有人类共有的语言处理能力的描述。尽管这种标准方法对人类语言产生了许多重要的见解，但它无法解释语言处理能力在许多方面并非所有人都一样，而是在不同的个人或群体之间存在很大差异。在正常发育的年轻人中，有充分证据表明，认知能力存在个体差异——例如，人们在记住信息和处理信息的能力上存在差异——这可能会影响语言处理能力。此外，随着人们从童年到老年的发展，语言处理能力在整个生命周期中都会发生变化，因此人类语言处理的故事不仅仅是关于年轻人的。最后，一些群体在认知或感知能力方面天生是非典型的，就像失明或耳聋的情况一样，这对语言和语言处理有重要的影响。理解语言处理能力的可变性具有迫切的重要性，因为语言是现代人类生活几乎所有方面的主要交流手段，包括学校、工作和媒体环境。了解语言处理能力变化的本质将有助于识别需要帮助的个体，并制定帮助他们的方法。关于人类语言处理机制变化的研讨会将与2019年城市大学人类句子处理年度会议（3月29日至31日，在科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）一起举行。人类句子处理会议是北美研究人类如何理解和产生语言的首要事件。研讨会将召集研究语言处理机制变异不同方面的研究人员，包括该领域的一组专家。研讨会将使关注语言处理变异的研究人员和主流心理语言学研究人员之间进行科学讨论，这将增强我们对语言处理变异的理解。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。

The ability to comprehend and produce language is crucial to the success of human beings across history and is crucial to success in modern life. The question of how this ability is enabled by the human brain is one of the central challenges of cognitive science. The most common approach to answering this question has concentrated on documenting the language processing abilities of typically developing young adults, generating accounts of language processing abilities that are shared by all human beings. Although this standard approach has produced many crucial insights into human language, it fails to explain a number of ways in which language processing ability is not the same in all people but rather varies substantially across different individuals or groups of people. Among typically developing young adults, there are well-documented individual differences in cognitive abilities--for instance, people vary in their ability to hold information in mind and manipulate that information--which can shape language processing ability. Moreover, language processing ability changes across the lifespan, as people develop from childhood to old age, and thus the story of human language processing is about more than just young adults. Finally, some groups of people are congenitally atypical in terms of cognitive or perceptual abilities, as in the case of blindness or deafness, and this has important implications for language and language processing. Progress in understanding the variability of language processing ability is of pressing importance, because language is the primary means of communication in nearly all facets of modern human life, including school, work, and media environments. Understanding the nature of variations in language processing ability will aid in identifying individuals who need help and in developing methods for helping them.The workshop on Variation in the Mechanisms of Human Language Processing will be held in conjunction with the 2019 Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (March 29-31, at the University of Colorado, Boulder). The Conference on Human Sentence Processing is the premier event in North America for research on how humans comprehend and produce language. The workshop will convene researchers working on different aspects of variation in the mechanisms of language processing, including a group of experts in the area. The workshop will enable scientific discussion amongst researchers focused on variation in language processing and mainstream psycholinguistic researchers which will enhance our understanding of variation in language processing.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.