Research on human sentence processing seeks to understand the moment-to-moment computations that enable competent speakers of a language to understand and produce sentences. Progress in this domain requires an interdisciplinary approach, one that draws upon the expertise and tools developed in several fields. Those tools include experimental and observational methods developed in psychology and neuroscience; descriptive, comparative and deductive techniques developed in theoretical linguistics and philosophy; and computational techniques for creating and analyzing language corpora to acquire information about language use. This proposal focuses on recent advancements in technologies for tracking brain activity during language comprehension. The funds support a special session on the cognitive neuroscience of sentence processing to be held in conjunction with the 2010 meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (March 18-20, 2010), as well as a 2-day pre-conference tutorial workshop (March 16-17, 2010). The special session is designed to showcase cutting edge neurolinguistic research using different technologies. The workshop is designed to provide a detailed presentation of standard and emerging neuroimaging and brain monitoring technologies, such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).
The special session and the workshop will help both new and established researchers meet one of the major challenges to investigating a complex system such as language comprehension. Unquestionably, progress is best made when a variety of experimental techniques are used to investigate different aspects of the comprehension system. Expanding a researcher's skill set is challenging in the best of circumstances, but particularly so when it involves cognitive neuroscience techniques, which are developing at an extremely rapid rate. The special session and the tutorial workshop will create important and unique opportunities for language researchers to interact with highly successful scientists who use neural methods to address core questions in sentence processing. Minimally, this exposure should enable a researcher to become an "informed consumer" of relevant research using these new methodologies. For cases where these approaches could be fruitfully applied to core questions in a researcher's area of expertise, this exposure may induce the researcher to seek out further training or collaborations to capitalize on the advantages of combining one of these approaches with those currently used. Although valuable to all in attendance, the special session will provide a unique opportunity for graduate and postdoctoral students to learn about cutting-edge research using methods that were not part of their training regime, as well as to interact with leading scientists using those methods.
The ease and rapidity of human language production and comprehension belies the fact that both are remarkably complex tasks, consisting of highly automated sequences of cognitive operations. Understanding the nature and organization of these operations requires expertise and tools developed in several fields. Over the past two decades, technologies that enable the tracking of brain activity during language use (e.g., electroencephalography [EEG], functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI], magnetoencephalography [MEG], transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS], and near infrared spectroscopy [NIRS]) have have proved to be key tools for investigating the basic cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in language use. The grant provided support for a special session on the application of these technologies to core issues in neurolingusitics that was held in conjunction with the 2010 meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, as well as support for a 2- day pre-conference tutorial workshop. The special session consisted of presentations of cutting-edge research by five leading scientists in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The workshop was conducted by experts in EEG, fMRI, MEG, TMS, and NIRS, who provided tutorials on these technologies and overviews of standard techniques and recent developments (designs, analyses, etc.) appropriate for language research. 434 researchers attended the CUNY Sentence processing conference and the special session sponsored by NSF (7 corporate attendees, 155 faculty researchers from around the world, and 255 students from around the world). The special session consisted of five invited speakers whose research employs multi-modal approaches to language processing and clearly demonstrated the advantages of exploiting different (behavioral and imaging) techniques. These invited talks presented cutting-edge research using EEG, fMRI, MEG, TMS, AND NIRS methodologies, and emphasized linking results across methodologies. The 2-day tutorial workshop consisted of 4 half-day sessions, with individual sessions devoted to fMRI, EEG, MEG, and a joint session on TMS and NIRS. They provided an overview of standard techniques, leading into a presentation of recent developments (designs, analyses, etc.) appropriate for language research and comparisons of the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches. It was attended by 165 researchers (4 corporate attendees, 28 faculty, and 133 students). The special session and the tutorial workshop created an important and unique opportunity for language researchers to interact with highly successful scientists who use neural methods that have advanced our understanding of core issues in the field. Both venues provided language researchers an opportunity to learn about new or alternative approaches and to capitalize on those that might be fruitfully applied to their research area. For all researchers, but particularly for young investigators (graduate students and postdoctoral researchers), the venues provided an opportunity to confront advanced research using technologies for tracking brain activity, and they afforded graduate students or postdoctoral researchers a unique opportunity to learn about approaches not adequately represented at their training institutions, and to consider whether their research could benefit from these approaches.
