Conference: Computational and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Language is a unique property of human beings. Children can acquire one, two, or multiple languages depending on the input that they receive, and many people continue to learn new languages throughout their lives. The scholarly field for language study is linguistics, and one linguistic framework is generative linguistic theory. Important areas of study in this domain include how languages are represented in the human mind, how these mental representations are acquired by children, how the different languages of a bilingual or a second language learner influence each other, and how language acquisition proceeds in the presence of developmental disabilities. In addition to advancing a scientific understanding of how the human mind works and how learning proceeds, research on second language acquisition has practical implications for many other fields including literacy development, foreign language instruction, and the identification and treatment of language disorders. This conference brings together established researchers and junior scholars who study second language acquisition and bilingualism from the generative perspective. The conference addresses core questions on how second and bilingual language acquisition proceeds and features a special session focusing on advances in psycholinguistics and computational approaches. The special session examines how second language learners and bilinguals process linguistic input and the mechanisms for second language acquisition, as well as how recent advances in computational modelling and tools have opened new research paradigms and novel insights. The convergent use of behavioral data and computational modeling can be a powerful tool to promote theory development, facilitate the interpretation of behavioral findings, and generate hypotheses for new second language research. The conference features four invited talks by prominent researchers with expertise in bilingual and second language acquisition of grammatical phenomena, and, in the case of the two special session speakers, psycholinguistics and computational modelling. The conference encourages broad participation: three invited speakers are women, the conference provides travel awards to graduate student and post-doctoral scholar presenters, and selected papers from the conference are published in a proceedings volume. 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.