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.
