Language provides us with a powerful means of sharing information with other people. Within a sentence, the informativity of expressions varies. For example, some parts of the sentence may be relatively uninformative because they are highly predictable based on what has already been said, or because they involve information that the hearer already knows. In contrast, other parts of a sentence are more informative because they provide new information and mention things previously not known by the listener. When we speak, we continually have to make choices (largely unconsciously) about how to order linguistic elements of differing levels of informativity within an utterance and how to realize them - for example, when to say something like "My neighbor Pat did not break the window!" or when to just say "He didn't!." These issues are also relevant when understanding language: When we listen to someone else or when we read text, we are faced with the task of extracting the intended meaning. A growing body of research suggests that informativity plays a key role in language. However, many questions about the role of informativity in language processing remain open, and different research traditions have approached these questions in different ways. Significant advances in addressing these open questions would be facilitated by bringing together researchers from these various traditions and providing a forum for exposing future generations of researchers to a variety of perspectives on the question of informativity in language processing.
In this project, the investigators will organize a special conference session on these issues, to be held in March 2015 at the University of Southern California, in conjunction with the 28th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. CUNY conferences are attended by a rich cross-section of the academic community, from undergraduates through senior scholars. From its inception, this conference series has been committed to attracting graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and other new researchers, encouraging them to attend and also to participate in the proceedings. Holding the special session in conjunction with CUNY will thus ensure a wide audience. The special session is designed to evaluate how informativity impacts language production and comprehension, in order to contribute to our understanding of how questions of informativity can inform theories of language processing. The investigators have invited six distinguished scholars with special expertise to give spoken presentations at this special session. Presentations from the broader community of researchers working on these issues will also be solicited. This special session aims to draw together diverse strains of research; this can inform the work currently being done within each subfield and can potentially result in new collaborative ideas. Issues related to informativity provide a fertile ground for tools and insights from computer science and computational linguistics, in addition to psychology and theoretical linguistics, thereby opening the door to new cross-fertilization between these fields. The special session will also contribute in important ways to the training of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Educating and inspiring young scientists has a powerful impact on the future of scientific research.
