A special conference session entitled "Lexical Representation and Sentence Comprehension: A Multidisciplinary Perspective," will be held in conjunction with the 11th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 19-21, 1998. Lexical influences on processing are currently a major focus of attention in psycholinguistic studies of sentence comprehension; however, much of the work remains isolated from the vast amount of scientific activity on the topic of the lexicon in other subdisciplines. This is an opportune time to bring together researchers from these different perspectives to exchange ideas and information that can help to inform each others' work. For the special session, the organizers have invited four speakers from linguistics, computer science, and philosophy who have made significant contributions to recent research on the lexicon in their fields, concerning the structure of lexical information and the computation of probabilistic models over lexical features. In addition, three discussants from the mainstream sentence processing community will play a key role in the session, by elaborating on those aspects of the invited talks that are of particular relevance to theories of human sentence processing. The proposed special session, along with a panel discussion and a set of talks and posters selected from submitted abstracts on the topic, will provide a unique and timely multidisciplinary exchange between the relevant areas of research. The CUNY conference is particularly well-suited to host the special session because of its multidisciplinary nature, attracting psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists who investigate all aspects of the human sentence processing mechanism. In order to continue the dialogue on lexical representation among the various fields, the organizers plan to publish an edited volume containing the papers from the special session.
