The National Science Foundation is providing support for the Boston University Conference on Language Development to be held at Boston University each November from 2007 through 2011. The conference is an internationally recognized meeting for researchers in the areas of first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, language disorders, and literacy development. It is attended by 500-600 researchers from around the world each year. Its presentations are chosen by anonymous peer review, and its proceedings are published by Cascadilla Press. Since 1976, the faculty and students of Boston University's Applied Linguistics Program have organized and run the conference. Drs. Shanley Allen and M. Catherine O'Connor lead the team of organizers for the 2007 conference.
The Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD), which has been held annually since 1976, is arguably the most important annual conference in language development in the world. Our aim is both to provide a forum for presenting the best current work in the field of language development, broadly defined, and to serve as a catalyst for the exchange of ideas and findings among scholars from different perspectives in the field. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health jointly provided funding to support student participation both in running and attending the conference, and to enhance the conference's value by supporting audiovisual equipment rental and introducing a lunchtime symposium with a small panel of invited speakers. This funding covered the meetings from BUCLD 32 (2007) to BUCLD 36 (2011). 570 attendees on average came to the meetings each year, nearly evenly split between student (average 55%) and non-student (average 45%) attendees. The program each year consisted of 81 presented papers, 72 poster presentations, a keynote lecture and a plenary lecture delivered by prominent senior researchers in the field, and a lunchtime symposium on a topic of current relevance or controversy, presented by 3-4 researchers with differing perspectives. These papers and posters represent work from many diverse areas of the field, including both new explorations and advances in longer-term programmatic research, in many content areas associated with both linguistics and psychology, concerning several different learning conditions, and from various theoretical perspectives. The quality of presentations is always excellent, ensured by the highly selective review process (an average of 175 expert reviewers evaluate the average 474 abstracts submitted, of which 32% were accepted for presentations). The conference draws wide participation, both international and domestic, and from across the US: about 40% of the authors presenting at the conference come to the conference from outside the US, and of those who come from within the US, only roughly half are from the eastern states. All stages of a researchers' career are represented in the presenters as well; of the first authors, about 30% are faculty, 40% are doctoral students, 20% are postdoctoral fellows, and 10% are Masters students, undergraduates, or independent/industry researchers. Virtually all of the oral presentations are given using projected slides, the equipment for which was made possible through grant support. Student support was a major focus of this award, including assisting 132 student presenters with travel costs to attend the conference over the five years and providing student registrants with copies of the conference proceedings. The award also funded stipends for the student organizers of the conference, which is almost entirely student-run. Approximately 10 students each year were supported for coordinating the many aspects of organizing the conference; these tasks both provide valuable experience in themselves, and provide students with a deeper understanding of the field of language development and with an opportunity to interact directly with many of the major figures in the field. In addition to the students funded by the award, each year 50-100 student volunteers help by working at the registration desk, chairing sessions at the conference, reading and processing abstracts, preparing materials for attendees. In exchange for this work, the student volunteers attended the conference for free. The student volunteers were primarily undergraduates, many with little exposure to the field of language development. Participating in the excitement of the conference environment, watching leading researchers in the field interacting with students, all presenting the most advanced work in the field, gives the volunteers (and other students alike) a strong and positive sense of the field, what it involves, and what it is like to be a researcher, leading many to pursue further (or indeed their first) studies in the areas of language development, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and related fields on display at the BUCLD. This award also made possible the annual lunchtime symposium, designed as a forum for researchers who take differing perspectives on a common topic to present their results, comment on presentations of other panelists, clarify points of difference, and discover and share areas of commonality. Specifically, the award provided travel assistance to bring invited speakers to the symposia. The symposia have been very successful, drawing about 300 attendees every year. The results of the conference are made public in a two different ways. First, the presentations at the conference itself are attended by many of the most active researchers in the field. Second, roughly half of each year's presentations appear in a two-volume Proceedings, containing the orally-presented papers and published roughly six months after the meeting, and in the Proceedings supplement on the BUCLD web site, containing papers based on the poster presentations.
