The Role of Processing in Language Variation and Change

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Linguistic communication is fundamentally a social activity, involving at least two people. A comprehensive theory of language must explain both what goes on in the minds of individual speakers and how those individuals attend to and coordinate with their interlocutors. Psycholinguists study the unconscious mental processes involved in speaking and understanding language; sociolinguists study how social factors like age, gender, class, ethnicity, and regional differences influence language use. These two types of investigators often study the same linguistic phenomena from their own perspective, but there have been few attempts to combine the perspectives. A special session at the 2011 meeting of the annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing will focus on the role of processing in language variation and change. As part of the premier annual psycholinguistics conference in the United States, it will address the interaction of individual and social psychological factors in language use. Bringing together these two research communities will provide a foundation for richer and better grounded theories of language production and understanding. This will support applications to language technologies (such as machine translation and automatic summarization) and language pedagogy.