Approaches to Studying World-Situated Language Use: CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 15-17, 2001, Philadelphia, PA

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant will fund a special conference session on 'world-situated language use in natural dialog', held in conjunction with the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The conference, held March 15-17, 2001, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is the most prominent U.S. conference for the interdisciplinary study of human language understanding. On an annual basis, it brings together roughly 250 linguists, psycholinguists and computational linguists interested in detailed processing accounts of language comprehension and production. The special session, entitled "Approaches to Studying World-Situated Language Use: Bridging the Language-as-Product and Language-as-Action Traditions," is designed as a step toward linking conversational/discourse research with the formal linguistic and mechanistic approaches typically found at the CUNY conference. Five prominent researchers working in this bridging area have been invited to give talks and participate in a panel discussion. In addition, peer-reviewed submitted talks and posters on this topic will be presented in accompanying sessions. It is hoped that by holding this symposium at the CUNY Conference, timely cross-disciplinary discussions will occur so to inspire a new generation of psycholinguistic and computational research on questions such as how natural utterances with disfluencies are processed, how information from context, gesture and linguistic input are combined in real-time processing, how interlocutors coordinate attention, and how these coordination processes impact real-time language processing commitments.