The State of the Art in Language Production: A Special Session of the 2016 International Workshop on Language Production

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Few skills (if any) are more important than the ability to express our thoughts through language. Without it, we would be unable to record our history; to codify our laws; to institutionalize our accumulated knowledge; or to profess the nuances of our feelings to each other. As such, it is essential that we better understand how our brains and minds enable this indispensable skill. But, the study of how humans do language is currently undergoing major shifts. We have unprecedented technology that allows us to investigate the brain as people produce language live. We have developed computational tools to extract insights from major databases of produced language of all forms. Our increasingly global society places speakers of different languages into close contact, making multilingualism more the norm than ever before. And after decades of treating all human minds as the same, we have renewed the study of how each of us differ. With funding from the National Science Foundation, experts from around the world will be brought together for a special session that will inform the community of scientists who study language production on these major developments in our field. The special session, titled The State of the Art in Language Production, will be the centerpiece of the 2016 meeting of the International Workshop on Language Production, to be held in La Jolla, CA, in July, 2016. The speakers were invited to the special session to bring a diversity of perspectives and experience. Nina Dronkers, VA Research Career Scientist and Director, Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders at the VA Northern California Health Care System has for decades been conducting cutting edge work on how brain disorders affect language production. Stefan Th. Gries, Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara is a mid-career expert on the computational analysis of large-scale language databases. Gerrit Jan Kootstra, Postdoctoral Scholar, Pennsylvania State University is an early investigator with expertise in bilingual language production. Antje Meyer, Director, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, is one of the world's leading figures on the behavioral study of language production, and has begun a comprehensive effort to understand individual differences in language production. And Kristof Strijkers, Marie Curie (IEF) fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France) and the Laboratoire de Psychology Cognitive (Marseille) is an early investigator who uses neuroscience techniques to better understand the brain basis of language production. Together, these presentations will bring the latest and most important insights to a worldwide interdisciplinary community of scientists who are helping us to better understand how human beings produce language.