Advances in Neurolinguistic Research and Methods

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Research on human sentence processing seeks to understand the moment-to-moment computations that enable competent speakers of a language to understand and produce sentences. Progress in this domain requires an interdisciplinary approach, one that draws upon the expertise and tools developed in several fields. Those tools include experimental and observational methods developed in psychology and neuroscience; descriptive, comparative and deductive techniques developed in theoretical linguistics and philosophy; and computational techniques for creating and analyzing language corpora to acquire information about language use. This proposal focuses on recent advancements in technologies for tracking brain activity during language comprehension. The funds support a special session on the cognitive neuroscience of sentence processing to be held in conjunction with the 2010 meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (March 18-20, 2010), as well as a 2-day pre-conference tutorial workshop (March 16-17, 2010). The special session is designed to showcase cutting edge neurolinguistic research using different technologies. The workshop is designed to provide a detailed presentation of standard and emerging neuroimaging and brain monitoring technologies, such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). The special session and the workshop will help both new and established researchers meet one of the major challenges to investigating a complex system such as language comprehension. Unquestionably, progress is best made when a variety of experimental techniques are used to investigate different aspects of the comprehension system. Expanding a researcher's skill set is challenging in the best of circumstances, but particularly so when it involves cognitive neuroscience techniques, which are developing at an extremely rapid rate. The special session and the tutorial workshop will create important and unique opportunities for language researchers to interact with highly successful scientists who use neural methods to address core questions in sentence processing. Minimally, this exposure should enable a researcher to become an "informed consumer" of relevant research using these new methodologies. For cases where these approaches could be fruitfully applied to core questions in a researcher's area of expertise, this exposure may induce the researcher to seek out further training or collaborations to capitalize on the advantages of combining one of these approaches with those currently used. Although valuable to all in attendance, the special session will provide a unique opportunity for graduate and postdoctoral students to learn about cutting-edge research using methods that were not part of their training regime, as well as to interact with leading scientists using those methods.