This proposal requests NSF funding to support students and distinguished speakers for a special session on sentence processing at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing to be held in March 2009 at the University of California, Davis. To understand how people speak and comprehend language, researchers need to consider how speaking and comprehension influence each other. Currently, language researchers tend to treat understanding and speaking as separate phenomena, and they build separate theories to handle the two domains. Although substantial progress has been made in developing theories of language understanding and speech even when the two are investigated separately, a better understanding is possible if researchers consider how production affects comprehension and vice versa. The immediate goal of this project is to foster communication between researchers who study production and researchers who study comprehension with the further goals of 1) encouraging and developing collaboration between researchers in language comprehension and language production, 2) advancing linguistic and psycholinguistic theory by encouraging researchers to include connections between comprehension and production in their models, and 3) to promote research that integrates concepts from production and comprehension so that the resulting theories provide a more comprehensive description of human language.
The CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing is one of the most prominent and successful meetings for researchers interested in experimental psycholinguistics and sentence processing. The proposed special session of the 22nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing will create a number of important and unique opportunities for language researchers by bringing them into contact with highly successful scholars whose work bridges the gap between speech and language comprehension. The special session will involve researchers from multiple disciplines to foster interdisciplinary research and promote new and exciting collaborations. The funding will also help graduate students to participate in the meeting in various ways, including reduced fees and opportunities for travel support. Finally, the invited speakers include members of underrepresented minorities.
