Linguistic communication is fundamentally a social activity, involving at least two people. A comprehensive theory of language must explain both what goes on in the minds of individual speakers and how those individuals attend to and coordinate with their interlocutors. Psycholinguists study the unconscious mental processes involved in speaking and understanding language; sociolinguists study how social factors like age, gender, class, ethnicity, and regional differences influence language use. These two types of investigators often study the same linguistic phenomena from their own perspective, but there have been few attempts to combine the perspectives.
A special session at the 2011 meeting of the annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing will focus on the role of processing in language variation and change. As part of the premier annual psycholinguistics conference in the United States, it will address the interaction of individual and social psychological factors in language use. Bringing together these two research communities will provide a foundation for richer and better grounded theories of language production and understanding. This will support applications to language technologies (such as machine translation and automatic summarization) and language pedagogy.
The annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing is the premier psycholinguistics conference in America, bringing together researchers from several disciplines (psychologists and linguists, as well as some computer scientists, philosophers, and education specialists) who study the unconscious mental processes that underlie our ability to produce and comprehend language. Much of the research reported at this conference investigates alternative ways of saying more or less the same thing (e.g. "give a bone to a dog" vs. "give a dog a bone"), seeking to explain why one or the other is preferred in a given context. These explanations tend to focus on factors that make a linguistic form easier or harder to produce or understand. Various types of language variation are also studied by sociolinguists, but they tend to look for explanations in terms of social factors, such as the age, region of origin, ethnicity, gender, or socio-economic class of the speaker and addressee. In some cases, psycholinguists and sociolinguists study the same linguistic alternations, but look for entirely different types of explanations for the choice of form. A special session at the 2011 CUNY Conference, held at Stanford University, brought together people from these two research communities, in the hopes that the insights from each would improve the quality of the explanations proposed by both. While most of the work reported at the CUNY Conference, including the special session, is rather basic research, it has clear implications beyond academia. The most obvious is in the realm of language teaching, where understanding why fluent speakers choose one form rather than another can be useful in designing maximally helpful pedagogical materials. A related possible application is in dealing with language disorders. A number of the presenters at the conference are actively engaged in such applications of their research. Yet another use for the research presented is in the field of natural language technologies: if computers of the future are going to interact with their users in natural language, considerable work still needs to be done to make computer-generated language sound more like what a person would say. Understanding why people choose the forms they do will help reach that goal.
