International Conference on Head-final Structures, Rochester, NY, September 2007

Rochester Institute Of Tech, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

The award will support an international conference on comprehending, speaking, and learning of syntactic structures in a wide variety of human languages. It will be held at the Rochester Institute of Technology on September 21 and 22, 2007. The field of human sentence processing has made remarkable strides in recent years, though largely through the investigation of English, a head-initial language whose critical grammatical information therefore tends to appear in phrase-initial position. Studies have shown that findings based solely on languages with head-initial structures like English may not extend to head-final languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Korean and German, and those with some head-final structures such as Chinese. Therefore, comparison of head-initial processing with head-final processing is critical for researchers to gain deeper insights into how human minds process different types of information in different types of languages. Despite the increased awareness of the importance of head-final structures over the last fifteen years, opportunities for researchers to extensively discuss them have been limited. The proposed conference will promote dialogue and interchange among international scholars performing cutting-edge research on languages with head-final structures, and will provide a venue for presenting new data and analyses, exchanging new methodologies, examining language-specific issues, and determining a research agenda for the field over the next several years. It is expected that the conference will also increase our understanding of how learners acquire languages that contain head-final structures. Selected papers will be published in a volume that is expected to enjoy wide dissemination.