Literacy, Education, and Language Processing: Special Sessions at the Human Sentence Processing 2023 Conference

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Language is vital in everyday life. The field of psycholinguistics seeks to understand the cognitive mechanisms of language comprehension and production. It examines how working memory, attention, world knowledge, and learning systems affect language use. But, much research in this field has relied on literate, university-educated samples. Scientific theories have not been tested across the full range of language and literacy skills. This gap makes it harder for educators to use psycholinguistic research to improve language-related education. There is a clear need to unite research and researchers in psycholinguistics with those in education and literacy. This project supports a special session at the 2023 Annual Conference on Human Sentence processing. The session highlights connections between psycholinguistics, educational psychology, and educational technology. The session will help describe how language processing is shaped by formal education and literacy. It will also characterize how we can use our knowledge of human language processing in education. This special conference session is titled "Literacy, Education, and Language Processing." It will be held at the 2023 Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of Pittsburgh. The HSP conference is formerly known as the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. It has been the top psycholinguistics conference in North America for decades. About 400 people attend the three-day conference. The conference includes about 35 oral and 150 poster presentations selected from over 300 abstracts. As part of the special session, six invited speakers will discuss the interface of psycholinguistics with literacy and education. They will talk about (1) how formal education and literacy may alter language processing, (2) how students experiencing a nonstandard dialect at home may be disadvantaged by the burden of adapting to the language of formal education, and (3) how educational technology can quantify language experience and attainment. The project helps train junior scientists with discounted registration, need-based travel stipends, and junior researcher awards. The project broadens participation in the field by inviting minority-serving institutions to a livestream of the special session talks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.