Workshop on Language Processing and Language Evolution: Special Session at the 2017 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

It is a central goal of the field of linguistics to characterize the process by which the human brain links the forms of language with some representation of meaning--a process unique to humans. Understanding this process has practical value in a world where language barriers and foreign language learning are increasingly important, where new media and new forms of language use (for example, as on the Internet) play an increasingly large role, and where algorithms that seek to bestow computers with understanding of human languages are proliferating and have increasing impact on day-to-day life. Within the field of psycholinguistics, the most common approach is to take languages as given and to study the processes by which humans comprehend and produce utterances in those languages. Here, using ideas from functional linguistics, quantitative typology, and evolution, workshop participants will explore the reverse approach. Taking some knowledge of human information processing as given, participants will examine systematic differences among languages, variation among grammatical constructions within languages, and the diachronic emergence and development of language structures. Using this evolutionary view of language, presenters will discuss novel hypotheses about the relationships between processing and linguistic structure, and shed new light on how human language operates both within speakers and over time. This project is for a special conference session, Language Processing and Language Evolution, to be held in conjunction with the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference is the premier event in North America for scientists interested in how humans comprehend and produce language. The conference regularly receives well over 300 abstracts for roughly 35 oral presentation slots and 150 poster slots. Approximately 400 scientists (faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students) attend the conference as audience members and presenters. Conference attendees come from all over the United States and Canada, and from Europe, Australia, East Asia and Latin America. The conference has been remarkably successful as an interdisciplinary forum, drawing researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, neuroscience, and philosophy. The special session is designed to extend our current knowledge of language processing by providing a richer characterization of the linguistic systems that humans learn and use, from the perspective of models of language evolution: how these linguistic systems got to be the way they are. Workshop participants will explore how human languages have and have not been shaped by information processing constraints. The ultimate goal is to create a more realistic and representative picture of diversity among languages and of how the human mind represents and processes those languages.