ABSTRACT SBR 96-16376 PI: MacDonald This proposal requests funds for a Special Session of the 10th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing on the topic of The Link between Child Language Acquisition and Adult Language Comprehension. The CUNY Conference is the primary research meeting of psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists who study how humans comprehend language. The special session is necessary because researchers who study human adult language comprehension typically have not taken advantage of work indicating how children learn language. There is now good evidence that the way in which language is learned in childhood affects the way in which it is represented and comprehended in adults, and so the time is ripe for presentations at the CUNY meeting. In addition to offering important insights into the nature of human capacities for learning and language, a better understanding of language comprehension in humans may have important practical applications to computer language comprehension systems, as well as possible clinical applications with children or adults with language disabilities.
